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UNSETTLED QUESTIONS, 



By the Same Author 



The Fifth Gospel 

The Land Where Jesus Lived 

CY 

J. M. P. OTTS, D.D., LL.D. 



Fully Illustrated 

Cloth $1,25 



This book, as the title indicates, is a care- 
ful study of the four written Gospels in the 
lights and shades of the land where Jesus 
lived and taught. When they are thus stud- 
ied it is found that the land so harmonizes 
with them, and so unfolds and elucidates 
their meaning, that it forms around them, as 
it were, a fifth Gospel. 



" It presents a vivid picture of Bible scenery and 
a safe and sound thinker's illumination of many 
Scripture texts by the light 8f travel."— C^rzjzf/a« 
Thought. 

"A book of great ability and vivacity that will 
arouse much interest and elicit much thoughtful 
discussion. ' ' — Christian Observer. 

"A charming and instructive volume that ex- 
hibits keen observation and critical power." — Pres- 
byteria7i Journal. 

"Whatever other books one may have read on 
Palestine, he will find new pleasure and instruc- 
tion from the perusal of this." — Central Presby- 
terian, 

" This book is really inspiring."— 7"^^ ^^z/^z^^. 
Sent postpaid on receij>t of ^rice 

Fleming H. Revell Company 

New York, 112 Fifth Avenue 
Chicago, 148 & 150 Madison Street 



THE £AVIDSON COLLEGE DIVINITY LECTURES 
"^ FOR THE YEAR MDCCCXCIII 

UNSETTLED QUESTIONS 

TOUCHING 

THE FOUNDATIONS OF 

CHRISTIANITY 



H BooF? for Ubougbtful louno /Uen 




J. M. P. OTTS, D. D., LL. D. 

AUTHOR OF "the FIFTH GOSPEL," ETC. 



tf tbe fountations be ^e«tro8e^, 
wbat can tbe rigbteoua ^o ? 

PSALM xi: 3 






iijo ^¥y 



FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 

NEW YORK CHICAGO 

112 Fifth Avenue 148 & 150 Madison St. 

Publishers of Evangelical Literature 



\-^ 



^•^ 






Copyright, 

1893, 

Fleming H. Revell Company. 



The Library 
OF Congress 



WASHINGTON 



r> 



r 



v^ 



DEDIOATIOK 

To Lelia J. Otts, my beloved wife, and our eight 
sons, who are growing up in the faith which she 
taught them when as Httle ones they knelt at her 
knee to pray, and to Davidson College, my beloved 
Alma Mater, and her numerous sons who are fill- 
ing various positions of usefulness in Church and 
State for which theii* Christian education has quali- 
fied them, and to all thoughtful young men into 
whose hands it may fall, I most affectionately dedi- 
cate this book, which has been written for young 
men, hoping that, in this age when the faith learned 
at mother's knee is unsettled in so many minds, it 
may help remove honest doubts from earnest souls, 
and confirm in them an intelligent and reasonable 
faith in the glorious religion of Jesus Christ, the 
Son of Mary, who is at once our Lord and Saviour 
and our great and all-loving Brotherman. 

J. M. P. Otts. 
Magnolia Hall, Greensboro', Ala. 



" The superstition ivJiicli smv in all natural phenomena the 
action of capricious deities tvas not more irrational than the 
superstition which sees in them nothing hut the action of in- 
variable laiv.^^ — The Duke of Argyll. 



VI 



PEEFAOE. 

The substance of this little book was prepared 
for undergraduates^ and was delivered as lectures 
on the Evidences of Christianity to a company of 
college students ; but the book^ as now published, 
is intended for the benefit of the people at large, 
especially for the use of thoughtful young men. 
This fact is indicated on the title-page, because we 
wish to emphasize it as the reason why this unpre- 
tentious volume is given to the public. As it was 
originally designed for beginners in college studies, 
it is hoped that it may be instructive and helpful 
to the great mass of general readers who have not 
time to peruse and study the voluminous and pon- 
derous works of, the great writers on the living 
questions that touch the very foundations of Chris- 
tianity. All men who think and read at all must 
be profoundly interested in such questions, but only 
a few, comparatively, have leisure and opportunity 
to give to the original works of the great writers 
that careful and protracted study that is required 
to enable them to comprehend their technicalities 

vii 



viii PREFACE. 

and to appreciate their arguments for or against 
the Christian reUgion. 

The position that this little volume aspires to fill 
is that of a daysman or interpreter between the 
great philosophers and scientists and the common 
people. In a word, the work aims to be at once 
philosophical and popular, scientific and yet simple. 
In order to fill this position we have endeavored, as 
far as possible, to avoid the use of technical terms 
and phrases, and to express our thoughts in the 
plain and practical language of every-day life. And 
also, in order that our work might be thoroughly 
adapted to the purpose for which it is published, 
we have given, as a prolegomenary preface to the 
body of the book, the philosophical basis of thought 
on which the process of reasoning in our argument 
is grounded. We wish to place in the hands of the 
general reader a little volume that is complete in 
itself, containing all explanations and definitions 
necessary for the full comprehension of aU points 
and principles involved in the discussion. 

The title, ^^ Unsettled Questions Touching the 
Foundations of Christianity," is not meant to im- 
ply that the foundations of Christianity are them- 
selves in an unsettled condition, but that human 
inquiry concerning them is ceaseless and unending. 
The great questions which we discuss are now, as 



PREFACE, ix 

they have always been, open questions. When they 
receive unquestionable answers, they will cease to 
be questions at all. Questions once in debate must 
be held as unsettled until the debate is closed by a 
unanimous decision in the affirmative or negative. 
For the great questions that touch the foundations 
of Christianity the day of unanimous decision has 
not yet arrived, nor is it likely soon to arrive. They 
have always been in debate, and it is not probable 
that they will cease to be debatable and debated 
for a long time to come. A large portion of Chris- 
tian literature, including writings that date back to 
the earhest Christian centuries as well as the very 
latest productions of Christian thought, is of an 
apologetic nature. Christians have made ample 
provisions, in perpetual professorships estabhshed 
in all leading educational institutions throughout 
Christendom, for the discussion of Christian evi- 
dences in all the ages to come. This shows that 
Christians themselves recognize the fact that great 
questions involved in the very foundations of Chris- 
tianity are yet unsettled, and are likely to remain 
in an unsettled state for many centuries yet to 
come. This state of affairs should not seem 
strange to us, for there are three great reasons 
that readily account for it. 

In the first place, the fundamental questions of 



X PREFACE. 

religion are not of a nature to admit of demonstra- 
tion amounting to mathematical certainty. But in 
this respect rehgion is not peculiar. The funda- 
mental questions of philosophy, science, and pohtics 
are equally incapable of mathematical demonstra- 
tion. This is evident in the various and conflicting 
schools of philosophy and science, and in the vari- 
ous and antagonistic forms of government. In all 
the great issues of life man believes and acts on 
the light and guidance of his reason, and not, hke 
the beasts, blindly, as moved by the unvarying im- 
pulses of instinct. All questions concerning which 
there is yet room for reasonable discussion must 
be held as unsettled. Where mathematical cer- 
tainty comes in, the possibility of progress and im- 
provement in knowledge ceases. 

In the second place, the interests at stake are so 
tremendous and supremely overwhelming that each 
new generation is constrained to reopen the funda- 
mental questions of rehgion, and to make fresh in- 
vestigations for itself. And each individual, when 
he begins to think for himself, and to guide his life 
by thought, feels himseK compelled to take up the 
great questions of rehgion, and to work out for his 
own life his own personal solutions. Therefore, 
while these great questions are settled in the minds 
of multitudes, they are always unsettled questions 



PREFACE, xi 

in the minds of the majority of the human race at 
any given time. They are unsettled questions in 
the sense that they are of perpetual duration, al- 
ways open for criticism and discussion. 

And in the third place, the great questions which 
we discuss are perpetually unsettled, because Chris- 
tianity has always had, and always will have, its 
enemies and opponents. These are divided into 
two great classes : those who reject Christianity 
because, if admitted, it would lay a prohibition on 
selfish passions which they wish to indulge; and 
those who cannot accept Christianity because it 
does not fall into accord with their conceptions of 
the nature and order of the universe. With the 
first class of unbelievers, unbelief precedes reason, 
and is not produced by it, but uses reason as a 
means of self-defense. The vast majority of unbe- 
lievers in Christian lands belong to this first class, 
and what is needed for their conversion is not 
a better informed intellect, but a better disposed 
heart. With the second class unbelief follows their 
reasoning, and is based upon their honest convic- 
tions, or rather upon their inability to come to 
honest convictions of the truth of the fundamental 
facts- of Christianity. They are sincere in their 
difficulties and doubts, and many of them are 
earnest and anxious inquirers after the truth. In 



xii PREFACE. 

their minds the great rehgious problems are un- 
settled questions because they have not been able 
to arrive at convincing conclusions. For this class 
we have the highest respect and the profoundest 
sympathy^ and to them we most respectfully com- 
mend our little book, hoping that its careful perusal 
may in some degree help remove from their minds 
doubts and obscurities^ and lead them to settled 
convictions on the most important questions that 
can engage human thought. 



00FTE1^[TS. 

Dedication v 

Preface vii 

PROLEGOMENA. 
The Philosophical Basis of Our Argument 1 

INTRODUCTION. 
The Foundations of Christianity *. 29 

CHAPTER FIRST. 
Is God an Eternal Person? 39 

CHAPTER SECOND. 
Is Man an Immortal Soul? 71 

CHAPTER THIRD. 
Is the Bible a Divine Revelation? 103 

CHAPTER FOURTH. 
Is Christ a Living Saviour? 137 



xm 



PROLEGOMENA. 

THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF OUR 
ARGUMENT. 



^^No difficulty emerges in theology icliich had not jpreviously 
emerged in jphilosojphy,^^ — Sir William Hamilton. 



PEOLEQOMElSrA. 

THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF OUK AKGUMENT. 



It is of prime importance that those to whom an 
argument is addressed should have from the outset 
a clear understanding of the philosophical basis on 
which its process of reasoning is founded. It is 
incumbent upon the author to show the soundness 
of his system of thought, the indubitableness of the 
data with which he begins, and the sufficiency of 
the mode by which he connects all the steps of his 
argument from his data to his conclusions. It is 
also important for the author to define in advance, 
or as he advances, the precise sense in which he 
uses any words or phrases that have ambiguous 
meanings. Therefore, as a prolegomenary preface 
to the lectures that are to follow, I here lay down 
in brief, and define the philosophical basis of the 
system of thought which I hold, and on which I 

ground my reasoning. 

3 



4 PROLEGOMENA, 

1. I hold that self -consciousness is the beginning 
of all human knowledge. I am conscious of my 
own existence. With this indisputable fact I begin, 
and upon it I build up my knowledge of myself 
and of the world by which I am surrounded. 

I am. Whatever I may be, and however I may 
have come into existence, of this I am certain, I 
am. This is the one fact that is proved simply by 
the assertion, because there must be an asserter 
before there can be an assertion. I say that I am, 
and that is the end of all controversy ; because, if 
I were not, I could not say that I am. I may be 
mistaken as to what I am, but I cannot possibly 
be mistaken as to the fact that I am. 

And now further, I feel, therefore I am a sen- 
tient being ; I think, therefore I am an intelhgent 
being; and I will, therefore I am a free intelh- 
gence. A free intelligence is a person — one who 
thinks and who acts as self-directed by his own 
free choices. I am thinking as I now write, and I 
know that I can write down my thoughts, or re- 
frain from writing them, just as I please. I think, 
and I am free to express my thoughts or to keep 
them to myself. I am a free person. I am to-daz 
and I know that I tvas yesterday ; therefore I re- 
member. Since I remember I am a continuous 
being. I am and I tvas, I who feel, think, and 



THE BASIS OF OUR ARGUMENT. 5 

will to-day am the same one who was feehng, 
thinking, and willing in all my past existence that 
is gathered up in my memory. My memory links 
my past existence with my present consciousness 
in a way that proves that I not only exist, but 
that I also persist in a continuous existence. By 
memory I not only recall a fact of past experience, 
but I awaken a present consciousness that I expe- 
rienced at a past time the fact that is recalled. 
Therefore I am not a succession of separate and 
independent feehngs, thoughts, and volitions, but 
I am a continuous person who has experienced the 
successive states of consciousness which memory 
recalls. Thus I become conscious of the unbroken 
continuity of my self-identity. I am the some- 
thing — the abiding personahty — that persists in a 
continuous existence in the midst of the succession 
of my changing feelings, thoughts, and vohtions. 
I am one and indivisible, and always the same one. 
But what am I ? I am more than a thought, or a 
succession of thoughts; I am a thinker. I am 
more than an act, or a succession of actions ; I am 
an actor. I think and I act, and I act as self- 
directed by my will. I am a continuous person. 
I remember my past thoughts and actions as my 
own; therefore I am a person of persistent and 
unbroken self -identity. I may cease to be in the 



6 PROLEGOMENA, 

future, but I have always been the 3ame person 
since I began to be. 

There may be sensibility without personahty. 
A thing, an oyster, for instance, may be sensible 
of its own existence without being able to distin- 
guish itself from other existences. It is mere sen- 
sitive matter. A thing may be conscious of its 
own separate existence without being able to de- 
fine its relations to other things. In such beings 
there is a consciousness of individuality, but not 
of personality. A mere animal, a dog, for in- 
stance, is conscious of its own individual existence 
and of the impressions that other existences make 
upon it, but it cannot define its place in the uni- 
verse nor its relations to the things by which it 
is surrounded. In this self-conscious animal life 
there is something higher than a mere sentient ex- 
istence 5 there is a simulation of thought, if not 
thought itself. But it seems, so far as our obser- 
vation can penetrate, that self-conscious animal life 
acts solely under the influence of internal impulses 
and external impressions, and as guided, not by a 
free will, but by the mysterious power of instinct. 
In all this there is nothing to contradict the hy- 
pothesis that all mere animal life, including its 
sensations and movements, is purely phj^sical and 
entirely under the domain of physical causation. 



THE BASIS OF OUR ARGUMENT, 7 

But when we come to man we find not only self- 
consciousness, but also self-direction in thought 
and action. Man is not only conscious of a dis- 
tinct individuality, but of a separate personality. 
He knows himseK to be a person who thinks and 
reasons his way to his conclusions, and who wills 
and chooses his course in life. In order to free 
choice there must be discrimination between 
thoughts, and in order to this discrimination there 
must be a cognition of the relations of persons 
and things. This cognition of the relations sub- 
sisting between things is real or rational knowl- 
edge. So far as our observation can penetrate, we 
see nothing to warrant us in supposing that mere 
animals are capable of perceiving things in the 
complications of their relations to one another. 
They are not capable of rational knowledge. They 
have sensations and impressions, but this does not 
amount to rational knowledge. They cannot de- 
fine and classify their sensations and impressions. 
They are not persons, but sensitive things that feel 
and act as impelled by their sensations. Their 
movements are effects produced by causes which 
have their origin in inward physical impulses, or 
in outward physical impressions. But yet the 
animal is something more than a bundle of sensa- 
tions. There is a persistent something that feels 



8 PROLEGOMENA. 

and moves as impelled. That something may be 
nothing more than sensitive matter — who knows ? 
There is nothing within the purview of our obser- 
vation to compel us to infer the existence in mere 
animal life of anything more than sensitive mat- 
ter, susceptible of internal and external impres- 
sionSj and of movements prompted by such sen- 
sible impressions. 

We have already found that man is something 
more than a composite bundle of sensations, 
thoughts, and volitions. He is a persistent some- 
thing that not only feels and moves as impelled 
by his sensations, but which also thinks and acts 
freely under the self-direction of his thoughts. Is 
that something, which is a self-conscious, a self- 
acting, and a seK-directing free intelligence, mere 
matter? Can any conceivable form of mere mat- 
ter account for the rational thoughts and free ac- 
tivities of human life ? 

What is matter ? We know matter only in its 
phenomenal attributes. We see the phenomena 
and infer the entity of which they are the mani- 
festations. The phenomenal qualities of matter 
are either primary or secondary. The primary at- 
tributes are those that belong to all matter, and 
without which matter cannot exist. The second- 
ary are those qualities which are not essential to 



THE BASIS OF OUR ARGUMENT. 9 

the existence of matter, and which may therefore 
exist in one mass of matter and not in another. 
A stone has extension and form, and is hard. Ex- 
tension and form are primary and essential attri- 
butes of matter, but hardness is a particular quality 
of the stone. We cannot think of matter without 
conceiving of it as having some shape and as fill- 
ing some space, but we may conceive of matter as 
being hard or soft, liquid or solid, visible or invis- 
ible, tangible or intangible. All matter must be 
extended, and must have some shape, some consist- 
ency, some size, and some weight. Now, incom- 
patible attributes cannot inhere in the same entity 
at the same time. The same thing cannot be at 
the same time square and round, hard and soft, 
bitter and sweet. 

Now let us apply these essential conditions of 
material existence to thought and volition and see 
if we can account for them as attributes of matter. 
Can we conceive of a thought or a volition as hav- 
ing physical dimensions or physical consistency — 
as being round or oblong, hard or soft, liquid or 
solid, white or some other color? If it is a phe- 
nomenon of a physical entity, it must fulfill an alter- 
native of these several conditions of physical exist- 
ence. We cannot conceive of a thought as having 
weight, size, shape, color, or a physical consistency. 



lO PROLEGOMENA. 

And besides^ can we conceive of a volition — a 
free choice — as enchained in the concatenation of 
physical cansation ? Are my volitions — am I my- 
self — nothing but the inevitable outcome of the 
necessary determinism of physical causation? If 
there be nothing but matter in the universe, there 
can be no free will — no personahty. But I will — 
I know that I am fi^ee in my volitions ] therefore 
there is something in this universe that is not en- 
chained in the iron links of physical causation — 
there is something that is not matter. We call 
that other entity mind. I am as a free intelli- 
gence not matter, but mind. Mind cannot be the 
product of matter. Matter may be the product .of 
mind, that is, of creative mind. At present we 
are only concerned about the human mind — our 
mind. We find that it is not matter. I am not a 
phenomenon. I am a persistent entity that thinks 
and wills ; and I remember my thoughts and my 
volitions. I have found myself, and I find that I 
am not matter, but mind. I am a person — a free 
intelligence that thinks, wills, and remembers, and 
acts as self -directed. 

As a free intelligence I perceive the relations of 
things, and I compare and correlate their relations 
and draw inferences. Thus I accumulate a store 
of rational knowledge, inferring the unknown from 



THE BASIS OF OUR ARGUMENT, II 

the known. I am a reasoner, and the conclusions 
of reasoning, if grounded on a sound basis, and if 
its processes be logically conducted, are just as 
trustworthy as the data of consciousness and the 
facts of observation. Every argument must be 
founded on a sound philosophical basis of thought 
in order to conduct the reasoner to true conclu- 
sions. Science is concerned about the phenomena 
of things. Things may be either physical or psy- 
chical. The science of physical phenomena is phys- 
ics. The science of psychical phenomena is meta- 
physics. Philosophy is concerned about the laws 
of thought. It is the foundation that underlies 
both physics and metaphysics. If the philosoph- 
ical bases of an argument are not sound the con- 
clusions are not trustworthy. 

2. In my self-consciousness I find that I am 
capable of reflecting upon myself. I analyze my 
self-consciousness, and I find these three things 
necessarily involved in it : a subject, a verb, and 
an object. I — know — myself. 

If I know, I must know something, and know that 
I know it. It is in this way that I come to know my- 
self as a being that knows. When I think, I know 
that my thought is not myself, but something which 
I do. I distinguish between myseK and my thoughts. 
I know myself to be a subject that knows. 



12 PROLEGOMENA. 

Thus I find that in my consciousness I distin- 
guished between myself and the faculties of 
thought^ feeling, t\tI1, and memory of which I find 
myself possessed, and also between my faculties 
and their activities ] and yet I find that my differ- 
ent faculties are but different modes in which I my- 
self, always one and always the same one, act. It 
is not a part of me that thinks, another part that 
feels, another part that wills, and another part that 
remembers ; but it is myself, always one and always 
the same one, that thinks, feels, wills, and remem- 
bers. Whatever other faculties or capacities I find 
myself in possession of, I find that they are only 
the various modes in which I am capable of acting, 
or of being acted upon. Thus I am conscious of 
being an indivisible one, and always the same one. 

From this analysis I have the following indis- 
putable data of consciousness, the indivisible unity 
and unbreakable continuity of my self -identity as 
a being who thinks, feels, wills, and remembers. 

3. I now drop the prefix ^^self^- and consider 
consciousness as a mode in which I, the self-con- 
scious being, act or am acted upon. We distinguish 
between consciousness and self -consciousness just 
as Sir William Hamilton distinguishes between 
perception-proper and sensation-proper. The two 
things are inseparable, but distinguishable. Self- 



THE BASIS OF OUR ARGUMENT. 1 3 

consciousness is the man himself aware of his own 
existence, and consciousness is a modification in 
self -consciousness by which the man becomes aware 
of his faculties and their activities as distinguish- 
able from himself and from one another. Con- 
sciousness is that state of self-consciousness by 
which we become aware of w^hat transpires within 
ourselves as thoughts, feelings, volitions, recollec- 
tions, and the like. Man becomes conscious that 
his faculties and their activities are distinct, though 
inseparable, from himself. They are modes of self- 
movements. 

4. I am conscious not only of my self-existence 
and subjective activities and passivities, but also 
that I e:^ist in the midst of an external world by 
which my life is environed and conditioned. It is 
not needful, in order to a clear apprehension of our 
system of thought, for us to enter into the discus- 
sions of the philosophers as to how we become con- 
scious of the external world. It is sufficient for us 
to say, in our view, perception is that modification 
in consciousness by which we are made cognizant 
of the external world and of the phenomena of the 
things in it. This is effected by impressions made 
upon the internal consciousness by the sensations 
of touch, vision, hearing, taste, and smell, when 
these senses oome into proper relations with their 



14 PROLEGOMENA, 

appropriate objects, or rather with the appropriate 
properties of external objects. 

5. Beyond all this, I am conscious of another 
power within myself — the power of reason, by 
which I compare and correlate the data of internal 
consciousness and the facts of external perception, 
and construe them into the expressions of formu- 
lated thoughts. Thus I arrive at a cognition of 
the relations of things. This cognition of the rela- 
tions of things is knowledge in the proper sense of 
the word. 

6. In our system of thought the three great 
words are consciousness, perception, and reason. 
Consciousness is that modification of self -conscious- 
ness by which we become aware of what takes place 
within us ) perception is that modification of con- 
sciousness by which we are made cognizant, through 
the external senses, of what exists outside and 
around us ; and reason is that power of mind by 
which we compare and correlate the data of con- 
sciousness, including the facts of perception as re- 
ported to consciousness, and thus define the rela- 
tions subsisting between them, and discover the 
further truths that are involved in those relations 
and their implications. The greatest of these is con- 
sciousness, because it is the source — fons et origo — 
from which the stream of human knowledge flows. 



THE BASIS OF OUR ARGUMENT. 1 5 

7. I find that by reasoning I advance from the 
known to the unknown by one or the other of two 
methods of thought : by the immediate inference, 
or by the syllogistic conclusion. When one thought 
or fact necessarily infolds and imphes a second 
thought or fact, then that second thought or fact 
must be received as the necessary inference from 
the first. Descartes' celebrated Cogito, ergo sum is 
not a syllogism, but is an immediate inference. 
The fact that I think necessarily infolds and implies 
the fact of my existence. The presence of thought 
implies the existence of a thinker. If the first fact 
is admitted on the testimony of consciousness, the 
second fact must be also received as an immediate 
inference from the first. 

When two thoughts or facts are found to be in 
such a relationship to each other that the relation 
between them infolds and implies a third thought 
or fact, then that third thought or fact must be 
received as the syllogistic conclusion of the two 
preceding thoughts or facts. The conclusion may 
be affirmative or negative, that is, the relation be- 
tween the major and the minor premises may 
necessarily include the third thought or fact, or 
may necessarily exclude it. Every vegetable sub- 
stance is combustible. The tree is a vegetable sub- 
stance. Therefore every tree is combustible. The 



1 6 PROLEGOMENA. 

second fact, that the tree is a vegetable substance, 
is so related to the first fact, that all vegetable sub- 
stances are combustible, that the third fact, the 
combustibLlity of the tree, is included in that rela- 
tionship. No vegetable substance has the power 
of locomotion. Man has the power of locomotion. 
Therefore man is not a vegetable substance. The 
second fact, that man has the power of locomotion, 
is so related to the first fact, that no vegetable sub- 
stance has the power of locomotion, that it follows, 
as a third fact, that man is excluded from the class 
of vegetable substances. The syllogistic conclusion 
is the inevitable result that flows from the known 
relationship between two thoughts or facts, when 
the two thoughts or facts are found to be so re- 
lated that their relation includes, or excludes, the 
third thought or fact in question. 

8. In this way, by the immediate inference and 
the syllogistic conclusion, I find that my knowledge 
is continuously expanded and enlarged. Thus I 
advance, accumulating knowledge, from the known 
to the unknown. When the unknown becomes 
known I make it the foundation for further ad- 
vancement. 

In this progress of knowledge I start out with 
the fundamental axioms of thought as the ultimate 
foundation of all reasoning ) and on this f ounda- 



THE BASIS OF OUR ARGUMENT, 17 

tion I erect the temple of my knowledge by build- 
ing into it all the facts of my experience, and the 
immediate inferences and syllogistic conclusions 
that those facts infold and imply. 

But the question here arises, How do I come into 
possession of the axioms of thought which are the 
starting-points in every process of reasoning ? Is 
man's knowledge of them acquired by experience, 
or does he find them in his mind as innate ideas ? 
His knowledge of them, when viewed from differ- 
ent standpoints, has the appearance of being both 
innate and acquired. But if they are innate, they 
are not acquired ] and if acquired, they were not 
innate. 

We are obliged to agree with Locke that there 
are no innate ideas — ideas inborn in the mind as 
its birth-furniture. It is questionable, however, 
whether there ever was a philosopher of any repute 
who held the doctrine of innate ideas in the sense 
in which Locke presents and refutes it. But, on 
the other hand, it seems to me that Locke and his 
disciples have gone to an untenable extreme in the 
doctrine that the mind of the new-born child is 
like a sheet of blank paper, upon which experience 
alone can write its record. It seems to me, rather, 
that the mind at birth is like a flowering plant just 
shooting through tjie ground. At birth the mind 



1 8 PROLEGOMENA. 

is as destitute of ideas as the shooting plant is of 
flowers ] but it is the nature of the plant to develop 
flowers as it naturally unfolds itself, and it is the 
nature of the mind to form primitive convictions 
of the fundamental laws of thought in the processes 
of its natural development. They are not innate, 
but are as naturally unfolded in the development 
of the mind as flowers are in the development of 
the plant. They spring, not from experience, but 
from the mind itself, just as the flowers spring 
from the plant. They are not born in the mind 
nor tvitli the mind, but are born of the mind. As 
soon as presented they are recognized as true and 
indisputable. They cannot be proved by any pro- 
cess of reasoning, nor can they be doubted while 
reason holds her seat upon the throne of the mind. 
Our knowledge of the laws of thought, that is, 
the conditions of thought in general, springs up 
in our minds, when the occasion calls them forth, 
as primitive convictions — as a priori cognitions; 
while our knowledge of the facts of experience is 
acquii^ed — is a posteriori knowledge. Our a pos- 
teriori knowledge is oui- cognitions of facts and 
of their relations to one another, while our a p>riori 
knowledge is not a cognition of the facts of expe- 
rience, but of the laws of thought, ^^ under which," 
as says Sir William Hamilton, ^^ our knowledge a 



THE BASIS OF OUR ARGUMENT. 1 9 

posteriori — onr knowledge of facts — is possible.^^ 
Our cognitions of the necessary laws of thought, 
the self-evident axioms of thought, are not innate, 
but are primitive convictions of the mind that do 
not come into existence until the external occasion 
for their use calls them forth. As soon as sug- 
gested they are seen by all sane minds to be true, 
necessary, and universal. They are not innate, 
but are born of the mind itself, not as the product 
of experience, but as primitive convictions, arising 
in the mind itself when occasion calls for them. 
Hence, as Sir William Hamilton says: ^^This all- 
important doctrine has never been so well stated 
as in an unknown sentence of an old and now for- 
gotten thinker : ^ Cognitio omnis a mente primam 
origenij a sensibus exordium Jiabet primum.^ ^' Hence, 
our knowledge of the necessary laws of thought, 
which, from one point of view, seems to be innate, 
and from another point of view seems to be ac- 
quired, is neither, but is self-originated from the 
mind itself ] but the axioms of thought are never 
originated until an external occasion calls for 
them ; then they are immediately and universally 
recognized as primitive convictions of the mind, in 
themselves necessary and indisputable. 

9. Our purpose in this prolegomenary essay 
does not require us to give a list of the axioms of 



20 PROLEGOMENA. 

thought, but only to designate and define those 
which we shall use in the lectui^es which are to 
follow. The following are the most important. 

The data of consciousness are to be received 
simply on the testimony of consciousness as un- 
questionably trustworthy. This is the foundation 
on which all knowledge ultimately rests. 

The facts of observation, both the facts of in- 
ternal consciousness and of external perception, 
are to be received as realities — not as essential 
realities, but as phenomenal realities. We do not 
perceive existence in itself as absolute entity, but 
only in its phenomena ; but the facts of observa- 
tion, while they are facts of phenomena and not of 
entities, are realities and not illusions. The differ- 
ence between the data of consciousness and the 
facts of observation is this : the data of conscious- 
ness are the fundamental principles of existences, 
and the facts of observation are the j^henomena 
of things as they exist in theii' relations to con- 
sciousness. 

The thii^d great axiom of thought is the law of 
causation. The human mind is so constituted that 
it demands a cause for everji:hing that exists, un- 
less it be an eternal existence. Our thought cannot 
realize to itself the possibiUty of a phenomenon 
without a cause. By observation we simply know 



THE BASIS OF OUR ARGUMENT. 21 

that the thing is; but this does not satisfy the 
mind. We want to know why or how the thing is. 
Scientific knowledge is the knowledge of things by 
their causes. The law of causation is the philo- 
sophical basis of all scientific inquiry. It is the 
only road that leads to scientific conclusions. 

10. When I begin to think, I find that it is im- 
possible for me to advance in a progression of 
thought without postulating the law of causation 
as the mode of thought. When I see an object and 
wish to understand it, I begin at once to search 
for the cause or causes that produced it. When I 
find the producing cause, then I feel that I under- 
stand the object. I have reached a scientific knowl- 
edge of it. In this process of thought I postulate 
the law of causation as the invariable method of 
existence. When we lay down the law of causa- 
tion as a fundamental axiom of thought, we do not 
simply mean that it is the subjective order of the 
succession of thoughts within our minds, but that 
the mind conceives of it as the method of existence. 
Everything that exists, except the eternal thing, 
must have a cause. We advance 'from the known 
to the discovery of the unknown because tve hioiv 
— hy the cause of our Icnowing — that if such an effect 
exists it must have such a cause, or if such a cause 
exists it must produce such an effect. Every pro- 



22 PROLEGOMENA. 

cess of reasoning is a forward movement along the 
line of causation from the known cause to its nec- 
essary effect, or a backward movement from the 
known effect to its necessary cause. Science is the 
knowledge of effects in their causes, and of causes 
in their effects, and the systematic combination, in 
logical order, of the knowledge of things by their 
causes. Thus science is based upon the conception 
of the necessary sequence of cause and effect, as 
the invariable method of existence. This concep- 
tion is found in every sound mind. One in whose 
mind it does not develop at the dawn of thought 
is a born idiot. One who loses it after it has once 
been developed in his mind has become insane. 
Without receiving the law of causation as the 
method of existence, one can never conceive of the 
existence of anything beyond the observed facts 
of the narrow circle of his individual experience. 
This law of causation, received as the invariable 
method of existence, is the fountain from which 
the whole stream of logical ratiocination flows. It 
is man's power to grasp this law, and by it to dis- 
cover the unknown from the known, that elevates 
him above the beasts, which have no hght to guide 
them except the dull perception of their senses 
and the mysterious guidance of instinct. 

When we analyze the law of causation as the 



THE BASIS OF OUR ARGUMENT. 23 

invariable method of existence, we find that it in- 
volves in itself several corollaries. 

It demands the postulation of an eternal exist- 
ence as the First Cause of all causes. Without 
this uncaused beginning of causation there could 
be no existence at all except external existence. 

It demands for every effect an adequate cause. 
Otherwise, a part of the effect would be an un- 
caused existence. 

It demands that every cause must produce its 
full effect, except so far as its power is counter- 
acted, that is, diverted, by other causes resisting 
its operation. 

Like causes, operating under like circumstances, 
must produce like effects. Otherwise the law 
would not be universal and invariable. 

There can never be any more evolved in the 
effect than was involved in the cause 5 but there 
may be more involved in a cause than is put forth 
in producing a given effect 5 that is, a part of the 
power of the cause may be unexerted, and retained 
as unused power. 

11. It is on the law of causation, as the necessary 
method of existence, that the modern method of 
sci^itific experiments for the acquisition of knowl- 
edge is made possible. What is the boasted ex- 
perimental philosophy of the present age, with its 



24 PROLEGOMENA. 

metliods of scientific experiments^ but a search for 
causes from known effects, or of effects from known 
causes? And how does the experimenting scien- 
tist, when his experiment gives a result, know that 
the result may not be an accidental and fortuitous 
manifestation, except on the law that the same 
cause in the same circumstances must always pro- 
duce the same effect ? The law of causation as the 
invariable method of existence, and of changes in 
existence, is the corner-stone upon which the whole 
system of the experimental philosophy is founded. 
But we have already seen that the mind does 
not acquire its knowledge of the law of causation, 
as the invariable method of existence, from expe- 
rience, but that it springs into existence, as a prim- 
itive conviction, as soon as the first, external occa- 
sion calls for it. Thus, the so-called Experimental 
Philosophy is founded on a principle that is found 
to lie outside the range of experience. And now, 
further, the fundamental principle on which the 
Experimental Philosophy is based, when followed 
to its consequences, carries its field beyond the 
range of experience and the reach of experiment. 
A man^s knowledge, by the law of causation as the 
method of existence, is carried beyond the field 
of his personal experience ; and, on the same law, 
human knowledge is found to be wider than the 



THE BASIS OF OUR ARGUMENT. 25 

experience of mankind. Man knows, over and 
above the actual facts of Ms observation — the 
objects of his experience — all that he deduces from 
those facts as immediate inferences and syllogistic 
conclusions. The Experimental Philosophy, on its 
own terms, must admit as true whatever is neces- 
sarily inferred from the facts of experience and 
the demonstrations of experiments. This will carry 
Philosophy into the admission of truths of which 
man, in his present condition, has had no experi- 
ence, and which he cannot bring under experiment 
by any contrivance or instruments as yet at his 
command. The observed and admitted facts of 
astronomy as to the magnitude and movements of 
the heavenly bodies necessitate the inference that 
there are other heavenly bodies which cannot be 
seen by the most powerful telescopes. Here man's 
knowledge, based upon the facts of his experience, 
extends far beyond the range of his experience and 
the reach of his experiments. 

No man has ever seen a soul, but facts of our 
mental and moral experience necessitate the in- 
ference that souls do exist. Here, again, man's 
knowledge, based on his experience, extends be- 
yond the range of his experience and the reach of 
his experiment. 

No man has ever seen the essence of matter ; but 



26 PROLEGOMENA. 

man knows the properties of matter as facts of his 
experience^ and he has brought many of the prop- 
erties of matter under his experiments 5 and he 
knows, as a necessary inference, that matter as 
an entity does exist. Here, again, his knowledge, 
growing out of the facts of his experience, extends 
beyond the range of his experience and the reach 
of all possible experiments. Man^s knowledge of 
the existence of matter as an entity is only infer- 
ential. 

No man has seen God at any time ] but facts of 
human experience necessitate the inference that 
God exists as the Eternal Person of the universe. 
Here, again, man's knowledge, based upon the 
facts of his experience, extends beyond the range 
of his experience and the reach of all conceivable 
experiments. Man's knowledge of God is inferen- 
tial ; but his knowledge of the essence of his own 
body and of the entity of this material world, is 
also inferential. The greater part, and the best 
part of all man's knowledge, is inferential. It is 
by his inferences that man knows more than the 
beasts that perish. It is his power of inferential 
knowledge that elevates man into a whole realm of 
life and enjoyments above the highest possibilities 
of the dumb creatures, which cannot think of the 
God who made them, nor of a life to come. 



THE BASIS OF OUR ARGUMENT. 2J 

There is something more in this universe than 
that which can be measured and weighed ; there is 
man, who measures the extension and weighs the 
ponderosity of things: there is something more 
than what can be seen and felt 5 there is man, who 
sees the visible and feels the invisible: there is 
something more than experience and experiment 5 
there is man, who experiences and who experi- 
ments. And man from the observed facts of his 
experience infers the existence of other facts of 
which he can have no sensational experience. 
These inferred facts are as real and trustworthy 
as the observed facts. Man is not merely an ob- 
server of phenomena ; he is a reasoner. The act- 
ual facts of sensational experience and experiments 
are not the boundaries and limitations of human 
knowledge. 



INTRODUCTION. 
THE FOUNDATIONS OF CHRISTIANITY, 



29 



Every house is huilded hy some one; hut lie that hiiilt all 
things is God. Re that built the house hath more honor than 
the house. We look for a city that hath foundations, whose 
architect and Guilder is God. — The Epistle to the Hebrews. 



30 



II^TEODUCTIOK 



THE FOU]t^DATIONS OF CHRISTIANITY. 

God as the self-existent and eternal Person who 
created all things, man as a created and immortal 
person, the Bible as God's "Word inspired in the 
words of men, and Christ as the hving Saviour of 
a dead world, are the fundamental facts on which 
Christianity is founded. On these four great facts 
the temple of Christian faith and worship is erected 
as upon four solid foundations, lying one upon an- 
other. We say foundations and not corner-stones, 
because a corner-stone supports one corner of an 
edifice, and does not underlie the whole super- 
structure. A corner-stone might be taken out with- 
out destroying the building, but if the foundation 
be removed the edifice must fall. Each of the great 
facts enumerated above underlies the whole system 
of Christianity, and if either should be left out, the 
whole temple of our religion would fall to pieces and 
crumble into ruins. They are not detached corner- 

31 



32 INTRODUCTION. 

stones, but foundations, resting one upon another, 
each underlying every essential doctrine of Chris- 
tianity. 

The bottom foundation of all is the being of God 
as the eternal Person who created and governs the 
universe. This fact makes religion possible. If 
God be only unconscious matter, or impersonal 
force in matter, then man has nothing to fear nor 
to revere. A universe mthout a Personal God en- 
throned at its center is an endless concatenation of 
fatal causes and effects. In such a universe there 
can be no room for religion. There would be no 
supreme authority to be obeyed, nor supreme 
majesty to be adored. Rehgion is the worship of 
the Supreme Person by dependent persons. 

Unless man is a created person he is incapable 
of religion. Eeligion consists in the obedience 
and adoration of a created person for his Personal 
Creator. The existence of a Personal God makes 
religion possible, provided there be intelligent and 
responsible creatures to worship him. But is it 
necessary that the intelligent and responsible creat- 
ures should be immortal in order to render them 
capable of religion, and to make religion obligatory 
upon them ? If man's existence be limited to this 
life of mortal breath, then the highest form of his 
religion could be only a species of morahty, in 



THE FOUNDATIONS OF CHRISTIANITY. 33 

which the apparent expediency of the moment 
would be the highest motive to control his conduct, 
or to order his worship. If there be no life of 
compensations to follow the present fleeting and 
uncertain existence, then man's highest duty would 
be to get the highest and best self -gratification out 
of the passing hour. His only reasonable motto 
would be, ^^Let us eat and drink to-day, for to- 
morrow we die.'' If man be not an immortal per- 
son, then it is his right and his duty to get the 
highest self-gratification obtainable in the present 
life. Selfishness would be the law of his being, 
and self-gratification the chief end of his existence. 
To require anything more of man would be un- 
reasonable and oppressive. Could we call such a 
life of selfishness religious ? It is scarcely moral. 
But this is the highest that can be demanded of 
man, if it be all of hf e to hve and aU of death to die. 
If in this life only man has hope, he is of all creat- 
ures the most miserable. If man be only a superior 
beast, he can be under no more obligation to worship 
God than the beasts that perish. If man is not an im- 
mortal person, he is not capable of rehgion in any 
true sense of the word ; nor does he need it. But in 
our second lecture we will find that man is a created 
and immortal person ; and, consequently, rehgion for 
him is possible, and also reasonable and necessary, 



34 INTRODUCTION. 

On the two fundamental facts, that God is the 
self -existent and eternal Person of the universe 
and man a created and immortal person, a system 
of what is called natural religion might be founded ; 
but man, in his present condition, is conscious that 
a system of natural religion is utterly insufficient 
for his necessities. Man is conscious of sin, and 
left to the light of nature he can neither discover 
how he came to be a sinner, nor how he can escape 
from the guilt and pollution of his sin. Man is 
conscious that he has fallen into sin, and that sin 
has estranged his life from God, and that he cannot 
reason out from the light of nature a way of return 
and restoration to God's favor. In this way he is 
brought to the conviction that, if he is to have a 
true and saving religion, God must speak to him 
more clearly than he has spoken in the works of 
external nature, or in the workings of his own in- 
ternal consciousness and reason. In this way man 
is prepared to receive a divine revelation from 
heaven to teach him how he may direct his Life 
aright in its relations to his God and to his fellow- 
creatures. This needed revelation man finds in the 
Bible, which is presented to him as God's Word 
inspired in men's words. This Book is in human 
language, so that man can read and understand it ; 
but it is not the product of human reason. It re- 



THE FOUNDATIONS OF CHRISTIANITY. 35 

veals to man the truths concerning his God and 
himself which it is necessary for him to know in 
order to his salvation, but which his reason, unen- 
lightened by this divine revelation, could never 
have discovered. But the divine revelation of this 
Book is addressed to man^s reason, and he is to 
read and interpret it by his reason, and thus to 
learn from it his reasonable religion. The Bible, 
as the Word of God in the words of men, is the 
third fundamental fact on which Christianity is 
founded. This third foundation rests upon the 
two preceding foundations, God^s personality and 
man^s immortality, which underlies and makes 
possible the Bible as a divine revelation from God 
the eternal Person to man the immortal person. 
Christianity is in no sense a human philosophy 
reasoned out by man, but is a divine revelation 
made to man^s reason. He cannot admit into the 
system of Christian faith and worship anything 
not contained in the Bible, nor reject anything 
contained in the Bible from it. 

We open the Bible and we find that it contains 
the inspired revelation of the divine plan of man's 
salvation from sin and death unto immortal life, 
through the redemption of Jesus Christ, the living 
Saviour of the dead world. We find these two 
great facts clearly revealed ; first, that the world 



36 INTRODUCTION. 

is dead in sin ; and second, that God so loved the 
world that he gave his only begotten Son, that 
whosoever believeth in him should not perish, bnt 
might have everlasting life. This great truth, sal- 
vation for a dead world, the redemption of sinful 
men, through the life and death of Jesus Christ on 
earth, is the last foundation on which our Chris- 
tianity stands. This great truth, which is the sum 
and substance of the Bible as a divine revelation, 
underlies the whole system of Christianity. It is 
not a corner-stone supporting one corner of the 
ediJ&ce, nor sills supporting the walls, but the broad 
foundation underlying all the corners, all the walls, 
and the whole area of the temple of our Chiistian 
faith and worship. Whenever one stands in the 
temple of Christianitj^, he stands on this great and 
all-underlying foundation-fact — Jesus Christ, the 
living Saviour of the dead world. 

These four foundations, resting one upon an- 
other, are, after all, one and the same rock, the 
rock of eternal truth, on which our Christianity is 
founded. God, the self -existent and eternal Per- 
son, is the rock that lies at the bottom and under- 
lies the whole system. He created man, an immor- 
tal person, in his own image, and thus made him 
capable of religion. Man's immortaUty is the rock 
of God's eternal personality appearing in the life 



THE FOUNDATIONS OF CHRISTIANITY. 37 

of the person created in his image. The Bible is 
the impregnable rock of God's Word placed under 
fallen man to keep him from sinking into despair 
and endless death. Jesus Christy the living Saviour 
of the world of dead souls, is God appearing in 
human life as the Rock of Ages, cleft for man as 
a refuge from the death of sin. The whole system, 
the foundations upon foundations, are hewn out 
of one solid rock — God the eternal Person saving 
man the created and immortal person. The great 
Sphinx of Gizeh is not a detached statue, but is a 
mysterious image hewn out of the solid rock on 
which it stands, and of which it is an unbroken 
part. The human head, the lion's body, and the 
stone-cut temple underneath, are all one solid rock. 
Just so it is with our Christianity : the foundations 
and the superstructure are all one sohd rock, one 
eternal truth presented in various manifestations, 
God creating man in his own image, and then, 
when man had fallen into sin, redeeming him by 
entering into his life, and thereby lifting him out 
of his death. The rock of Egypt is a dead rock 
shaped into the image of man, but the rock of 
Christianity is a living rock, the Rock that restores 
life and the image of the living God to men dead 
in sin. 



CHAPTER FIRST. 
IS GOD AN ETERNAL PERSON? 



39 



" There is no need of abstruse reasonings and distinctions to con- 
vince an unprejudiced understanding that there is a God who 
made and governs the world, aftd who will judge it in righteous- 
ness; though it may be necessary to answer abstruse difficulties 
when once such are 7'aised ; when the very mea^iing of those words 
which express most intelligibly the general doctrine of religion is 
pretended to be uncertai7t, and the clear truth of the thing itself is 
obscured by the intricacies of speculation,'^'' — Bishop Butler. 



40 



THE FIRST QUESTION. 

IS GOD AN ETERNAL PERSON? 

The aim of this lecture is to answer the ancient 
questions, An sit Deus? and Quid sit Deus? — 
Is there a God ? and, What is God ? 

In my search for the true answers of these 
great questions I begin with myself, the first great 
fact of consciousness. 

I know that I now exist, and that I think, feel, 

and will, and that I am responsible for my actions. 

My memory carries my knowledge of myself back 

into the past, and I know that I have not always 

existed — at least, that I have not always existed 

just as I am now. Then, on the great law of 

thought, that every contingent existence must 

have an adequate cause, I know that there is a 

Cause that called me into being and that sustains 

my existence. That Cause must possess in itself 

all the powers and potencies that I find in myself ; 

otherwise, it would not be an adequate cause. 

41 



42 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS, 

I find in myself consciousness and conscientious- 
ness, intelligence, emotions, and a free will; in 
short, I find that I am an intelligent and responsi- 
ble person. Therefore, the power that called me 
into existence must be an intelligent and moral 
Person, because there never can be more evolved 
in the effect than is involved in its cause. 

This is the anthropological argument, and it 
gives me, as my Creator, an intelligent Person, 
who is, by virtue of his being my Creator, the 
moral Sovereign of my life. 

As the second great fact of my consciousness, 
I know that I exist in the midst of an external 
world. I look out upon the world around me and 
I see that all things are in a constant state of flux 
and change. Now, I know that whatever changes 
must have a cause to produce the change, and 
that whatever powers and potencies are mani- 
fested in or by the changes must be included in 
their cause. I see in the changes going on around 
me, and in the marks of the changes of past ages, 
order, system, and design. I know that there 
cannot be order without an ordainer, nor system 
without a systematizer, nor design without a de- 
signer. All this implies not only thought, but 



IS GOD AN ETERNAL PERSON ? 43 

also forethought; and not only will, but a will 
guided by wisdom. Therefore the Maker of the 
world must be a Power that thinks and designs, 
and wills and acts with a purpose. 

This is the cosmological argument, and it gives 
us, as the Creator and Sustainer of the world, a 
rational Person possessing power to perform his 
purposes. 

Considering my own being and the being of 
all things around me, I find that all existences are 
divided into two great classes, the conscious and 
the unconscious. First, there is unconscious dead 
matter. It is inert, having no power in itself to 
put itself into motion if at rest, or to arrest its 
movements if in motion. But when I consider 
the plants and trees around me, I find a species 
of matter that is not dead and yet is unconscious 
and incapable of self-motion. I find in the grow- 
ing plant a mysterious power of self- development. 
It causes the plant to increase in size, to clothe 
itself with leaves, to adorn itself with blooms, and 
to load itself with fruit. This proceeds from a 
vital force which, in the present state of human 
knowledge, is inexplicable. There is in it a 
power of self-motion in the way of growth, but 



44 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

the life of the plant does not overcome the inertia 
of its material substance. The living tree is just as 
incapable of self-motion as the dead tree. The 
power of vital movement in the living tree seems 
to be a something apart from the substance of 
the tree itself. It is a power that absorbs from 
the soil substances which it spins and weaves 
into the body of the tree. Here we have come 
upon the mystery of life. 

I now consider the animals around me, and I 
find in them a higher form of life. I find life that 
is self-conscious, and that imparts to the substances 
in which it inheres the power of self-motion. The 
live animal is conscious of its life, and it possesses 
in itself power to move itself from place to place. 
I am conscious of this animal life in myself. 
Whatever more I may be, I know that I am an 
animal. In my observation, I see that plants 
germinate into life and then die and decay, and 
that animals are born into life, and soon they die 
and pass away ; hence I know that life, as mani- 
fested in plants and animals, is a contingent exist- 
ence ; and therefore lif.e must have a cause ; and 
the cause of life must be life itself, because all 
that is evolved in the effect must be involved in 



IS GOD AN ETERNAL PERSON ? 45 

the cause. Therefore the self-existent Cause of 
all things must be eternal Life. 

I know that life inheres in matter as I see it in 
plants and animals, but I believe that it may in- 
here in mind apart from matter. I am conscious 
of the presence and activities of a Hfe within me 
— a life of connected and continued thought and 
of voluntary moral action — that cannot be ac- 
counted for and explained as the mere animal life 
of the material substances of which my body is 
composed. Therefore, there is a life of mind 
different from, and superior to, the life of matter. 
The life that is eternal, the life that is the Cause 
of all other life, must be life of the highest order. 
Therefore, God, the self- existent and eternal Per- 
son, must be a Hving Spirit. 

This is the ontological argument, and it gives 
us a self-living Spirit as the eternal Person who 
created all things and who is the sole and su- 
preme moral Ruler of the universe. 

Our God is the eternally living Spirit. In this 
conclusion the vast majority of mankind in all 
ages has rested, believing and acting upon the 
belief that there is a God who is the self- existent 
and eternal Person — the living Spirit who created 



46 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

and who governs the universe. But in every age 
there have been a few, always a very small mi- 
nority, who have dissented from this conclusion, 
and who present themselves before the world as 
atheists, who say there is no God, or as agnostics, 
who say that men can never know whether or 
not there is a God. This being so, we cannot 
rest our argument here in the almost unanimous 
conclusion of the common sense of mankind, but 
must go on and meet and refute the attacks that 
have been made upon this argument by atheistic 
philosophers and agnostic scientists. 

The philosophy of Kant threw a shadow of 
suspicion upon the argument by which the mind 
advances from causation to God as the great First 
Cause of all causes. That shadow hung over it 
for a season. He characterized it as a specious 
sophism, while admitting that it is the necessary 
conclusion of the logical progress of reason. This 
involved him in the dreadful doctrine that our 
reason is so constituted that it necessarily seduces 
us into error. It was intuitively felt that there 
must be a fallacy in the philosophy that involved 
a doctrine so fatal to the trustworthiness of the 
conclusions of reason. That fallacy has been 



IS GOD AN ETERNAL PERSON ? 47 

found and exploded. It consisted in Kant's 
regarding the law of causation as only the sub- 
jective condition of thought, and not as the 
method of both subjective and objective exist- 
ence. The fact is, our minds conceive of the 
law of causation, not merely as an abstract prin- 
ciple, but as the concrete method of all existences. 
On this conception, Kant's criticism falls to the 
ground. But let no one suppose for a moment 
that Emmanuel Kant, the great philosopher of 
Konigsberg, was an atheist. Far from it; he 
was not even skeptical as to God's existence and 
the soul's immortality. He bowed down on the 
loftiest summit of his transcendental philosophy 
and worshiped God as the Creator of the world 
and the Sovereign of the soul, believing in him 
on the moral testimony of his conscience. 

The modern system of the Experimental Phi- 
losophy, under the able leadership of the late 
John Stuart Mill, has earnestly attacked the cos- 
mological argument, so far as it is based upon 
the conception of a First Cause. But Mr. Mill, 
while attempting to discredit the argument from 
the etiological point of view, gives full credit to 
its teleological aspect. He says : '' It must be 



48 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

allowed that in the present state of our knowl- 
edge the adaptations in nature afford a large bal- 
ance in favor of creation by intelligence/* Mr. 
Mill was not an atheist. He did not accept the 
law of causation as a datum of consciousness, but 
only as a general conviction acquired through 
experience. His mind did not see any necessary 
connection between cause and effect beyond the 
uniformity of antecedent and sequence, as a fact 
of observation. He says : '' It is a necessary part 
of the fact of causation zintliin tlie sphere of ottr 
experience that the causes as well as effects had a 
beginning in time, and were themselves caused. 
It would seem, therefore, that our experience^ in- 
stead of furnishing an argument for a First Cause, 
is repugnant to it; and that the very essence 
of causation as it exists within the limits of oicr 
knowledge, is incompatible with a First Cause.'' 
It will be observed that Mr. Mill in this famous 
paragraph inserts the word knowledge in the clos- 
ing sentence as synonymous with experience, twice 
used in preceding sentences. This assumes that 
the sphere of our knowledge is identical with the 
sphere of our experience, and never transcends 
it. Grant this, and it will make Mr. Mill's argu- 



IS GOD AN ETERNAL PERSON? 49 

ment logical. Otherwise, it is d, petitio principii 
— a clear begging of the question. But our 
knowledge is wider than our experience. It 
embraces the whole field of experience, the data 
of consciousness, and the facts of observation, 
and, in addition thereto, the immediate inferences 
and the syllogistic conclusions that necessarily 
flow from them. Otherwise, man is not a rea- 
soner upon facts, but a mere observer of facts. 

Of course, within the sphere of our experience 
every cause is the effect of preceding causes ; but 
may there not be a cause outside the sphere of 
experience, that is, the First Cause of all causes ? 
Why not? Does not reason itself demand that 
we posit such an existence to account for the 
phenomenal causes and effects of experience? 
We must do this, or we fall into the absurdity of 
an infinite regression of phenomenal causes and 
effects. The conception of an endless series of 
causes and effects, going backward to a begin- 
ning that never begun, is an absurdity that can- 
not be construed in thought. The doctrine of 
causation does not teach that every existence 
must have a cause, but that there must be an 
eternal and uncaused existence as the First Cause 



50 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS, 

of all phenomenal causes and effects. This is 
intelligible. Mr. Mill's doctrine is not intelligible. 
If Mr. Mill could construe his doctrine as a clear 
proposition in his own mind, he must have had a 
mind differently constituted from the minds of 
men in general. The truth is, he deceived him- 
self by the witchery of his own words. The 
same witchery of words has deceived his disci- 
ples. Clear definition is all that is needed to re- 
fute his philosophy. There must have been a 
First Cause, or there could not have been a sec- 
ond cause, nor a series of secondary and phenom- 
enal causes and effects. 

But the First Cause may be only blind force 
inherent in eternal matter; then, what we call 
creation is only an evolution out of matter, pro- 
duced by this force acting in unconscious move- 
ments. But can this theory account for the 
thought and the forethought, the order of intelli- 
gent purpose, and the designs of discriminating 
will, everywhere seen in nature, and for the exist- 
ence of man as a free intelligence on the earth ? 
It cannot, unless there could be more evolved 
in the effect than was involved in the cause. 
Every cause produces its own effect, and cannot 



IS GOD AN ETERNAL PERSON ? 5 I 

produce anything else. Our experience teaches 
us this, and will not allow us to believe to the 
contrary. Wheat produces wheat, and not rye. 
Potatoes produce potatoes, and not pumpkins. 
And so on, throughout all nature, without a 
shadow of variation. When oxygen and hydro- 
gen gases are combined in proper proportions, 
they produce water; and there can be no ele- 
ment in the water thus produced that was not in 
the gases producing it. Disprove this law, which 
is an essential principle involved in the law of 
causation, then, immediately, the whole edifice 
of modern science, the glory of man, will fall to 
pieces. Therefore, there must be a First Cause 
that started the series of phenomenal causes and 
effects, and that keeps it going; and that First 
Cause must be an eternal existence that involves 
in itself all the powers and potencies that exist in 
the causes and effects that issue from it. This 
First Cause, whatever it may be, is the God of 
the universe. 

What is this First Cause ? We come now to 
the question. Quid sit Deus? — What is God? Is 
this First Cause material in its nature ? Or is it 
a complex being, a spiritual essence in a material 



52 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

substance? Or is it pure Spirit? One or the 
other of these three it must be. 

We have already found good reason for believ- 
ing that the First Great Cause of all things is 
eternal Spirit — the self- existent Person who is 
the Creator and supreme Ruler of the universe. 
But we must now take up this question again, for 
we are now answering objections that have been 
raised against the almost unanimous conclusion 
of the common sense of mankind. But as we go 
on, let us remember that ninety-nine per cent, of 
the human race concur in the conclusion to which 
our argument is to bring us. 

To suppose that the eternal existence, the 
Cause of all things, is purely material, is to adopt 
the hypothesis of materialism. On this hypoth- 
esis there is nothing in the universe but matter. 
Now our experience has taught us that inertia is 
a fundamental law of matter; that is, matter at 
rest can never move itself, and matter in motion 
can never arrest its own movement. But we 
find all matter in motion — the worlds are cease- 
lessly moving around in their orbits. This is 
called astronomical motion. What started that 
motion? Matter cannot start itself to moving. 



IS GOD AN ETERNAL PERSON? 53 

On our earth we find matter moving in three 
kinds of motion, known as locomotion, and molar 
and molecular movements. We find matter in 
living animal organisms moving itself from place 
to place, and find that dead masses of matter are 
moved by external force from place to place, and 
that the atoms of bodies are perpetually moving 
and changing their relations to one another. If 
there is nothing in the universe but matter, how 
did this motion begin ? How was the law of in- 
ertia overcome? This is the first, but not the 
greatest, problem that pure materialism has to 
solve. One solution offered is known as the 
nebulous hypothesis. It seeks to find the origin 
of all motion in molecular motion, the movements 
of the molecules or atoms of bodies. This theory 
is held upon both an atheistic and a theistic basis. 
We are at present only concerned in showing 
the insufficiency of the theory in its atheistic 
aspect. 

Molecular motion is due to the chemical affin- 
ity or repulsion of molecules for one another. 
But the atom, so far forth as it is a minute par- 
ticle of matter, is subject to the law of inertia; 
and unless it was eternally related to another 



54 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

atom so as to set the chemical force in operation 
from all eternity, there is no conceivable way in 
which it could, in the face of the known law of 
inertia, move itself into such a relation. It would 
be just as possible for the heavenly bodies, as 
immense masses, to set themselves in motion as 
for atomic particles to set themselves in motion. 
If matter is eternal, and if there is nothing in the 
world but matter and motion, then motion must 
be eternal as well as matter. We cannot find the 
cause of motion in matter, any more than we 
can find the cause of matter in motion. Is the 
universe, then, eternal matter in eternal motion? 
The motion, then, must be either motion at ran- 
dom or motion by invariable law : motion at 
random would plunge the universe into endless 
confusion and countless collisions ; and uncon- 
scious motion by invariable law must necessarily 
be motion in perpetual cycles, motion perpetually 
repeating itself. But the observation of our ex- 
perience does not give us motion in either of 
these orders. We see such a uniformity in the 
movements of particles, masses, and worlds that 
we know that motion is not at random ; and yet 
we see such a variety and conflict in motions 



IS GOD AN ETERNAL PERSON? 55 

that we know that all motions do not move in 
cycles, and hence motion is something more than 
a perpetual repetition of itself. But upon the 
theory that eternal matter in eternal motion con- 
stitutes the universe, the most inexplicable of all 
movements is locomotion and the voluntary 
movements of beasts and men. Here the theory 
of eternal matter in eternal motion, involving, as 
it necessarily does, the doctrine that all motions 
and mutations are enchained in the adamantine 
links of a material and mechanical concatenation 
of causes and effects, utterly breaks down. 

Some have thought to escape from this entan- 
glement by hypothecating eternal Force, inherent 
in eternal matter. But this hypothecates a some- 
thing in the universe over and above, and addi- 
tional to, matter and motion : a Cause, different 
from though immanent in matter, that produces 
motion. What is this, then, but making Force, 
a something that is not matter, the producing 
cause, and matter the material cause, of the uni- 
verse? This hypothesis involves the distinct 
abandonment of the theory of pure and unmixed 
materialism. This eternal Force is not matter, 
but power that moves matter. But does this 



56 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

eternal Force, immanent in matter, move matter 
aimlessly and blindly? If so, how then can we 
account for the order and design manifested in 
matter and its movements ? Ordination and de- 
sign are the unquestionable products of thought 
and forethought. Where there is thought, there 
must be a thinker. The law that demands an 
adequate cause for every effect requires this con- 
clusion. Then the eternal Force cannot be an 
attribute of matter unless matter can think. Can 
matter think? There is thought in the universe. 
Man thinks. Thought is written on the stars of 
heaven and engraven upon the rocks of the earth. 
Can matter think? Can force as an attribute of 
matter think? This is the second, the greatest 
problem that materiaUsm has to solve. John 
Locke, the father of the sensational theory of 
human knowledge on which the modern system 
of Experimental Philosophy is grounded, says: 
'' I appeal to every man's own thoughts, whether 
he cannot as easily conceive matter to be pro- 
duced by nothing, as thought to be produced by 
matter, when before there was no such thing as 
an intelligent being existing.'* The Force that 
created this universe, including thinking man, 



IS GOD AN ETERNAL PERSON? 57 

must be a power that thinks; and hence, must 
be Mind or Spirit. 

Man, the finite thinker, is a created spirit in- 
corporated in a body. Shall we say that God, 
the infinite Thinker, is the eternal Spirit imma- 
nent in matter? They say man is a microcosm, 
a mind in matter, constituting a Httle world; and 
that God is the macrocosm, the Infinite Mind 
immanent in eternal matter, constituting the uni- 
verse. But do they speak wisely? They utter, 
consciously or unconsciously, the doctrine of 
pantheism. If God is the Eternal Spirit imma- 
nent in eternal matter — the power that produces 
all material motions and mutations — then God 
is everything, and all things together are God. 
Then creation is only an evolution, and an evolu- 
tion that does not augment matter but only 
changes its forms and movements. On this the- 
ory there is no creation, and there can be no free 
will nor moral responsibility. But man knows 
that he is a free intelligence, and that he is re- 
sponsible for his actions. His consciousness, in- 
volving conscientiousness, contradicts and refutes 
the cheerless pantheism that makes God, as the 
eternal Spirit immanent in eternal matter, the 



58 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

macrocosm, and man a microcosm. God is not 
the universe, nor is man a little world. Man is 
only one of the countless creatures in the uni- 
verse which God has created and over which he 
reigns as the moral Sovereign of free intelli- 
gences. 

But how are we to explain the physical axiom, 
Ex nihilo nihil fit? We are to receive it as our 
experience gives it to us, as the law of changes 
in created matter. The eternal Spirit is the 
Creator of existences, while secondary causes, 
which fall under our experience, are only produc- 
tive of changes in existences. Absolute creation 
lies outside the realm of our experience, but the 
facts of experience necessitate the inference of an 
absolute creation at the beginning of all things. 
There is nothing absurd in the thought that the 
eternal Spirit created matter by projecting his 
power into material actualities. Because we 
know that matter cannot think, and because we 
know that there is thought and forethought in 
the order and designs of nature, therefore we 
must conclude that the First Cause of all things 
is Mind and not matter, and, as such, the Creator 
of matter in all its forms and with all its potencies. 



IS GOD AN ETERNAL PERSON? 59 

Man finds in his own mind an adumbration of 
the creative power of the eternal Mind. I know 
that I think and that I will, and that my volitions 
are free and self- originated. In my conscious- 
ness, I know that I am not under the law of a 
physical determinism. By my free volitions I 
originate my actions and control them, and that, 
too, contrary to all possibilities of prevision, and 
independent of all physical antecedents. All 
this I know on the immediate testimony of my 
consciousness, and not as the result of argument 
in which there might possibly be a flaw. This 
testimony of consciousness is the end of con- 
troversy. Man is free, and his volitions do not 
stand in the row of phenomenal causes and 
effects. His will is a subordinate power of caus- 
ation. His voHtions are not caused, but are caus- 
ative. Man creates his own actions. They are 
not links in the chain of physical causation. 
Only such actions as are consciously self-origi- 
nated, and knowingly directed to a purpose, can 
be said to be voluntary. Free will, involving 
the doctrine of volitions uncaused but causative, 
is the diadem of glory that crowns the life of 
man. It Lifts him above the beasts, and links 



6o UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

him into fellowship with the life of God — the 
Eternal and uncaused Cause of all phenomenal 
causes and effects. 

But man himself is not uncaused, but the 
Great First Cause in his creation has given him 
a subordinate power of causation, the power of 
free and self-originated volition. Otherwise, he 
is not a free intelligence, and cannot be a re- 
sponsible person. This subordinate power of 
causation in man is proof of the absolute power 
of creation in the God who made him. Mind in 
man does not create matter, but it controls it and 
directs its movements. The volition of my will, 
which I may withhold or put forth at my own 
pleasure, lifts my hands and moves my feet. I 
can do what I will, and go where I wish, under 
the necessary restrictions of the conditions of my 
life. To this extent there is creative power in 
my mind — in myself. I create my own actions ; 
otherwise, I would not be responsible for them. 
And beyond this, man can create a whole world, 
and people it with the personages of his own 
creation. The dramatic poet, Shakespeare, for 
instance, creates a world and peoples it with the 
characters of his own creation. The word poet 



IS GOD AN ETERNAL PERSON? 6 1 

is in Greek rroLrjrrjgj from ttolelv, to make. The 
poet is a subordinate creator. Now let the im- 
agination go one step in advance of the facts, 
and suppose that the poet, or novehst, had 
power to give material and permanent actuality 
to the creation of his genius, and we have, not a 
proof, but an illustration of the way in which 
God may have created the universe. But this 
much we know as a necessary inference, that all 
the powers and potencies in man existed first in 
his Creator; and we can readily conceive how 
God in creation may have projected from himself 
his created power in the permanent essences and 
forms of physical and psychical existences and 
actualities. This power is not in man, but there 
is in him an adumbration of it. God is greater 
than man. There must be in God greater power 
than the highest in man. 

But we come back from fancies to facts, from 
poetry to philosophy. Locke has laid down the 
principle as incontrovertible : '' What is first of 
all things must necessarily contain in itself, and 
actually have, at least all the perfections that can 
ever exist." Then, whatever is in man, except 
his imperfections, must exist in God his Creator. 



62 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

We go further and say that the very imperfec- 
tions of man must have originated in a power 
in man that is godhke and good in itself. All 
man's imperfections have their roots in his sin, 
and his sin sprung out of his free will. As there 
is free will in man, there must be free will in 
God. God is the Free Will of the universe. 

James Martineau says : '' Our whole idea of 
Power is identical with that of Will, or reduced 
from it. . . . Therefore, after weighing all objec- 
tions, I persist in regarding that which the nat- 
ural philosopher calls force ^ and Professor Tyndall 
raises to an immanent life, as Causal Will, mani- 
festing itself, not in interference with an estab- 
lished order, but in producing it. ... A power 
which is not Mind, yet may be ' potential ' and 
exist when and where it makes no sign ; which 
is ' immanent ' in matter, yet is matter ; which is 
manifested in the universe, yet is not ' a Cause,' 
therefore has no effects — presents to me, not an 
overshadowing mystery, but an assemblage of 
contradictions." Then, if all power is lodged in 
a self-moving will, and if God is the Eternal 
Causal Will of the universe, man, created in the 
divine image, is a subordinate power of causa- 



IS GOD AN ETERNAL PERSON ? 63 

tion, and his causative power is lodged in his 
will. The volitions of man's free will are un- 
caused, but causative. They are self-originated, 
and do not take their position in the row of 
causal necessities. How else can they be free? 
If not free, that is, self-caused, how can man be 
held responsible for doing what he chooses to 
do ? But man himself is not an uncaused being ; 
but God, in creating him, has endowed him with 
subordinate power of causation. His free will, 
volition uncaused but causative, is the diadem of 
glory that crowns his life with his personal re- 
sponsibility. In this way alone is sin a possibil- 
ity. If sin does not have its origin in the power 
of subordinate causation, lodged in the free will 
of man as a causative energy, then God must be 
the author of sin. Sin becomes possible in that 
very power in which man is most like his God — 
in man's subordinate power of causation. 

We find the highest dignity of man in his con- 
sciousness of his conscience. Man knows that 
there is a right and a wrong, and that he ought 
to do the right and to avoid the wrong. This 
word '' ought " is the highest in human language. 
It grows out of man's ineradicable sense of moral 



64 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

obligation. This implies that there is a moral 
authority over his life, which he is bound, in the 
very condition of his existence, to obey. God is 
infolded and implied as an immediate inference 
in the significance of the great word *' ought"; 
and he is implied in it as the moral Sovereign 
over the life of man. If there is no God in heav- 
en as the moral Sovereign of the universe, this 
word must be blotted out of human language. 
Blot this word out, and four fifths of all the 
books ever written by man will go out of exist- 
ence with it. It is the heart that pulsates in all 
human literature. Suppress this word, and all 
literature will fall prostrate in the dust of earth, 
just like a man whose heart had ceased to beat. 
This conscientiousness of which all sane men are 
conscious — this sense of moral obligation which 
is ineradicable in human consciousness — is the 
final argument that we present to prove that 
there is God, and that God is the moral Sover- 
eign of human Hfe. This sense of moral obli- 
gation infolds and implies the existence of two 
moral persons, lawfully related to one another as 
Sovereign and subject. If I am morally obli- 
gated, I must be obligated to some one who has 



IS GOD AN ETERNAL PERSON ? 65 

moral authority over my life — not to an ab- 
stract principle, but to a Person who can take 
knowledge of, and punish me for, any willful 
violation of my moral duty. We are not talking 
about what are usually called the laws of nature, 
such as the laws of gravitation, inertia, and mo- 
tion; they may mean nothing more than the 
uniformity of the modes of existence and move- 
ment. We are now speaking of moral laws, 
which men can and do disregard. There cannot 
be a moral law without a lawful authority to 
give the law, and a lawful subject to whom the 
law is given. The moral law, of which we are 
just as conscious as we are of our own existence, 
is indisputable evidence that there is a personal 
God who is the moral Sovereign of the universe. 
That there is a God is the conclusion ahke of 
the highest science and of the deepest philoso- 
phy, and of the plain common sense of mankind 
in general. There are many who do not con- 
ceive of God as you and I do, but they are not 
atheists. They believe in God as they conceive 
him. Darwin was not an atheist, nor was Hume, 
nor Gibbon, nor Voltaire, nor even Tom Paine. 
Colonel Ingersoll is not an atheist ; neither is he 



66 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

a scholar or a philosopher. He is a sentimental- 
ist. Mill, Spencer, and Huxley are not atheists. 
They call themselves agnostics, and say that phi- 
losophy and science cannot prove nor disprove 
the existence of a God. Herbert Spencer, the 
prince of them all, stands forth as the philoso- 
pher of the unknowable ; and his philosophy of 
the unknowable is itself, for the most part, un- 
knowable. His disciples to-day do not know 
whether it is to be counted on the side of theism 
or atheism ; some of them are trying to push it 
into atheism, and some are trying to pull it into 
theism. The science of the sciences of the clos- 
ing half of this nineteenth century is not athe- 
istic ; nor are its best representatives. It is not 
the Huxleys nor the Tyndalls nor the Darwins 
who are the real leaders of scientific thought of 
our age. These men are speciahsts, and have 
their minds biased in certain trends of thought. 
When they enter the field of the philosophy of 
science — the science of the sciences — they have 
upon their minds 'the bent of their favorite 
studies. They are not to be followed blindly in 
conclusions based upon premises drawn most 
largely from departments with which they are 



IS GOD AN ETERNAL PERSON? 67 

not over-familiar. Specialists are not considered 
as high authorities on points outside their special 
departments. A man who makes cotton-raising 
his specialty in life is not an agriculturist in the 
true sense of the word. Suppose that the scien- 
tific cotton-raiser should say, '' I know all about 
cotton, from the seed to the lint, and there is no 
bread of life in it — nothing that a man can eat 
and live upon. I will not go so far as to say 
that there is nothing in all the possible products 
of agriculture to support human life, but I will 
say, as a scientific agriculturist, I have not found 
in all my researches any such substance ; and 
as to the existence of such an agricultural sub- 
stance, I am an agnostic — I neither affirm nor 
deny.*' Would such a statement, from such an 
agricultural authority, shake the faith of your 
common sense in corn, wheat, barley, potatoes, 
rice, sugar, and the ten thousand other agricul- 
tural products on which men Hve and thrive? 
Now, Mr. Huxley is a palaeontologist, and in his 
department he is a scientific authority. In it 
he has made valuable discoveries. But when 
he comes forward and says, ^' I know all about 
shells and fossils ; I am a scientific expert, and I 



68 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

find in them no God, no soul, no immortality, no 
religion ; and now I declare, as a scientist, so far 
as my experience and my experiments go, there 
is no God in science, nor substance of religion, 
and therefore, so far as the existence of God and 
the immortality of the soul are concerned, I am 
an agnostic — I neither affirm nor deny,'* — would 
such a declaration, from such an authority, shake 
your faith? I would reply to all such as Mr. 
Huxley : '' You are a specialist in science, but 
not a real scientist in the high sense of the word. 
In your special department, taken by itself, there 
may be no proof of the existence of God, but in 
all nature there is ; and even your department, 
when studied in its relations with all others, may 
furnish important links in the chain of evidence 
that proves that there is a Personal God in heav- 
en, who is the Creator and Sovereign of all men 
on earth.'' 

Turning away from the specialists, I look up 
higher, and on the summit of the mountain of 
science, and on the loftiest peaks of the hill of 
philosophy, I see the Helmholtzes, the Wundts, 
the Lotzes, the Pasteurs, the La Granges, the 
Navilles, the Beales, the Dawsons, the Copes, 



IS GOD AN ETERNAL PERSON? 69 

the Danas, -the Grays, the Agassizes, the Hen- 
ries, the Kants, the Hamiltons, a great multitude 
too numerous to mention, from Europe, from 
Asia, from Africa, from America, and from the 
isles of the seas, and they are all down upon 
their knees, reverently and humbly worshiping 
the God of philosophy and science, whom they 
declare to be the living God of our Christianity. 
In the valleys and on the mountain-slopes, from 
base to summit, I see a vast and countless mul- 
titude of men, men of plain common sense and 
men of all grades of scholarship and thought, all 
bowing and worshiping the God who made them, 
and to whom they owe their lives. With this 
vast company of great men and of common men, 
with the kings and princes of science so exalted 
in knowledge and so humble in faith, with the 
men lowly in knowledge but lofty in faith, with 
the army of martyrs and confessors, with the 
good and godly of all ages, we bow down and 
worship the uncreated Spirit — the First Cause of 
all causes — the self-existent and eternal Person, 
who is the Almighty Maker and Supreme Ruler 
of the universe. 



CHAPTER SECOND. 
IS MAN AN IMMORTAL SOUL? 



71 



*' Thought and extension have no points in co^nmon. Matter is 
essentially divisible^ conscious7iess essentially indivisible. This 
proves that the soul is naturally immortal — that is, incapable of 
destructio7i by any statural causes. The simplicity of its being 
precludes dissolution, and that is the only form of destruction with 
which we are acquainted,"*"* — ^James H. Thornwell, D.D. 



72 



THE SECOND QUESTION. 

IS MAN AN IMMORTAL SOUL? 

There are some questions that never grow 
stale nor lose their power of fascination by the 
lapse of time. The question of man's immortality 
is the most fascinating of these undying questions. 
It is as old as the race, and yet it is forever as 
fresh as the dew of a new-born morning, and as 
fascinating as the first rays of the sun just rising 
out of the darkness of night. It can never lose 
its power to charm the hearts of men while they 
value their manhood, because it involves all that 
makes men superior to the beasts that perish in 
death. There comes a time in every one's ex- 
perience when this question, at all times interest- 
ing, pierces the heart to the very core and fills it 
with an interest so tremendous and awful that 
for the moment all other questions are forgotten. 
When we are called upon to close in death the 

eyes that once beamed in the light and love of 

73 



74 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

life, and to kiss cold and speechless lips that once 
spoke the words of love and sweetness but can 
never again respond to our kisses, and to lay- 
away in the silent grave, dust to dust, the lifeless 
form that is so loved for the sweet life that once 
lived in it, we cannot help asking, with our bleed- 
ing hearts in the question, '' Does this death of 
the body end all ? Is it our loved one that we 
here bury forever from our sight?" Our hearts 
answer, '' No ; our loved one was more than this 
mortal body which we here shut up in the lonely 
tomb ; she is an immortal soul, and she has gone 
into that Hfe that is never darkened by the shadow 
of death ; and there we shall meet and know and 
love one another again in the life that never 
ends." 

It is our purpose in the present lecture to show 
that this hope of immortal life, which is man's 
only comfort against the supreme sadness of this 
mortal life, rests upon a solid foundation which 
reason builds under the feet of dying men, to 
keep them from sinking down into dumb despair 
when death tears their loved ones from their arms 
that fall helpless by their sides. Our question is 
not, Has man an immortal soul? That doctrine 



IS MAN AN IMMORTAL SOUL? 75 

would shed a ray of hope upon the darkness of 
the tomb, suggesting that, after the sleep of death, 
the soul would awake, in the morning of the res- 
urrection, to life and consciousness again. That 
dim and far-off hope is insufficient to ease the 
aching heart as the feet turn away from the new- 
made grave in which the loved form of a departed 
one has just been laid away to rest in the sleep 
of death. Our question is. Is man an immortal 
soul? Is the soul the real man, and the body 
only the house in which the man tabernacles 
during the sojourn of this mortal life ? We under- 
take to prove that the soul within the body is 
the real man, and that man is a created and im- 
mortal person. The argument of this lecture is 
built upon the conclusions reached in the preced- 
ing lecture, the eternal personality of God being 
the foundation on which our hope of personal 
immortality rests. 

We now know that there is a God, and that 
God is the self- existent and eternal Person who 
is the Almighty Creator and supreme Ruler of 
the universe. This great truth, when once re- 
ceived, must be made the foundation on which 
all other truths rest. God is the word that ex- 



76 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

plains all the enigmas of human thought. The 
always living God is the cause of all existences, 
properties, and motions, and the fountain of all 
life, thought, and activity. Everything springs 
from God, and nothing can be thoroughly com- 
prehended until it is traced back to God as its 
source. 

Man, having found the cause of his being in 
God who created him, and who is, consequently, 
the Sovereign of his Hfe, takes up the ancient ques- 
tions of the race — What am I ? whence came I ? 
and whither go I ? — under a light which, if faith- 
fully followed, will lead him to the true answers. 
Man knows that he is an intelligent and moral 
person, because he thinks, feels, and wills. Thus 
he is conscious that he is a free intelligence, exist- 
ing under moral responsibility. He knows that 
he has not always been ; at least, that he has not 
always been the conscious person that he now 
knows himself to be. His memory goes back to 
a Hmited, but an uncertain, period in the past with- 
out ever being able to fix upon the exact moment 
of the beginning of his self-consciousness. He 
knows, however, that time was when he was not — 
at least, when he was not what he is now. If there 



IS MAN AN IMMORTAL SOUL? "]"] 

was a preexistence of his being before the period 
to which his memory carries him back, he has no 
proof of it whatever. Therefore man knows that 
he, such as he is now, had a beginning. He also 
knows that his life, as his memory traces it back, 
has been full of mutations and varied vicissitudes, 
but that, through all changes and vicissitudes, he 
has always been one and the same person. He 
is just as conscious of the unbroken continuity of 
his self-identity as he is of his self-existence. 
The old man tottering into his grave knows that 
he is now the same person that once existed in 
the vigor of unabated manhood, in the freshness 
of youth, and in the feebleness of infancy. He 
knows that he has grown physically and devel- 
oped mentally ; but as his memory goes back 
through all the changes and vicissitudes of life, 
he knows that he is now, and always has been, 
one and the same person. He cannot even im- 
agine that he ever was any other person than the 
person that he now is. Man may not be able to 
fix the date when he began to be a person, but 
he knows that from the beginning of his personal 
life he has always been one and the same person. 
Man knows, not from his consciousness but 



78 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

from his observation, that human life, since the 
creation of the primal pair, begins in a birth. 
Man knows that his life as one of the human 
race, but not one of the original pair, began in a 
birth. His birth is a well-remembered fact of 
human experience, though not a remembered fact 
of his own experience. All the facts of one's in- 
dividual experience are never remembered. But 
where was man, and what was he, before he be- 
gan to be born? This is a question for which 
neither memory nor present consciousness can 
furnish the answer. All that he can say is, if he 
was anywhere, or anything, before he began to 
be born, that prior existence, so far as his self- 
consciousness goes, is absolutely dissevered from 
his present personal existence. As the person 
that he now is, his existence began with the be- 
ginning of his present conscious life. He knows 
that he is now a self-conscious, intelligent, and 
responsible person; and he knows, because he 
knows that God is the First Cause of all things, 
that, such as he is, he came from God his Creator, 
to whom he is responsible for his actions. Man 
knows what he is and whence he came ; but does 
he know, or can he know, whither he is going? 



IS MAN AN IMMORTAL SOUL? 79 

What is to become of him ? He cannot help ask- 
ing the question, Shall I ever cease to be ? This 
is the question of all questions — the question 
which all men ask, and the one above all others 
for which they are most anxious to receive a sat- 
isfactory answer. 

We will now proceed to interrogate all sources 
from which man can gather information concern- 
ing this vital question, and see if from any one 
of them, or from all united, we can learn the an-, 
swer, or gather facts from which we can deduce 
the answer as an immediate inference or a syllo- 
gistic conclusion. These sources are man himself, 
the world around him, and God in the heavens 
above him. 

We begin our inquiry with man himself. Is 
there any voice in man's consciousness, or in his 
perception, or in his reason, that assures him that 
he is an immortal soul ? We put our conscious- 
ness, as it were, upon the witness-stand and hear 
its testimony upon the point in question. Con- 
sciousness tells us, at the very outset, that it has 
direct knowledge only of the present. Man may 
be conscious of a present memory of past events, 
or a present assurance of future events, but he is 



8o UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

not conscious of the past nor of the future. He 
can be conscious only of the present moment. 
He may know as a matter of fact, by his con- 
sciousness of a present memory, that certain 
things did exist in the past, and he may know, as 
a necessary inference or conclusion of reason from 
facts of which he is at present conscious, that 
certain things will exist in the future. Man may 
know much of the past and much of the future, 
in the conclusions of his reason from the facts of 
his present consciousness. Those conclusions, 
when reached by the reason, are present convic- 
tions in his consciousness. ]\Ian is now conscious 
of present life, but his consciousness cannot assure 
him of an endless future life. But some say that 
man is conscious of a present intuitive conviction 
that he will live forever. Those philosophers who 
assert this have mistaken an instinctive hope for 
an intuitive conviction. We have seen that there 
are no innate ideas, but that there are primitive 
convictions born of the mind itself. They spring 
into existence whenever an external occasion pre- 
sents a proposition of which the mind affirms them 
as the necessary truth. Intuition is a primitive 
conviction, not only that a thing is so, but that 



IS MAN AN IMMORTAL SOUL? 8 1 

it must be so. The truth thus affirmed is not 
only evident, but is self-evident. The mind can- 
not conceive its contrary. The immortality of 
man is no such self-evident truth as this. 

There can be no doubt or controversy about 
intuitive convictions. They are self-evident. 
Man is not intuitively conscious of being an im- 
mortal soul ; neither is he intuitively conscious 
that he is not an immortal person. Consciousness 
by itself cannot answer the question of man's im- 
mortality, either in the negative or in the affirma- 
tive. Can man's perception solve the problem of 
his immortality? Perception is the power by 
which man is made cognizant of the external 
world, through impressions made upon the phys- 
ical senses, and by them reported to consciousness. 
Man's immortality, or his non-immortality, is not 
a fact that can be perceived by any one of his 
five senses, nor by all of them combined. 

And now, last, we come to man's reason, and 
ask : Does man find in his reason a voice which 
solves for him the problem of his immortality? 
It is the office of reason to accept the data of 
consciousness and the facts of perception, and to 
compare and combine them, and to draw from 



82 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

them, when thus correlated, the inferences and 
conclusions necessarily involved in them. 

First, then, are there any known data or facts 
which compel the reason to draw the conclusion 
that man is not immortal? The first great fact, 
bearing upon this question, with which the rea- 
son has to deal is the fact of physical death. 
This fact stares man in the face, whatever way 
he may turn. Men are born into this world, 
and they die and pass out of observed existence. 
Does this death end all? This is the most an- 
cient question of the race. In the oldest Book, 
perhaps, extant it is asked, '' If a man die, shall 
he Hve again?" Experience has no affirma- 
tive answer for this question. Experiment can 
find no answer. But neither experience nor ex- 
periment can furnish a negative answer. A con- 
clusive negation would silence the question. It 
has not been found that physical death is the end 
of the life of man.- It has not even been found 
that physical death arrests the hfe of man. In 
order to reach a convincing answer, there are two 
preliminary questions that we must deal with: 
What is life ? and, What is the difference between 
life in men and life in beasts and plants ? There 



IS MAN AN IMMORTAL SOUL? 83 

are at least these three kinds of life of which man 
has knowledge — the vegetable, the animal, and 
the rational. 

But life itself, even in its lowest form, is some- 
thing that is beyond the touch of the finger and 
the light of the eye. We see its manifestations, 
but we cannot see Hfe itself. It eludes the pene- 
tration of the most powerful microscope. We 
can come very near it, but we cannot reach Hfe 
itself. We find what the scientists call bioplasm, 
or protoplasm, or germinal matter ; but this is not 
life itself, but only the primordial form in which 
life is manifested in its operations. This proto- 
plasm, or germinal matter, is a transparent, color- 
less, and glue-like substance, that appears, under 
the highest powers of the microscope, to be abso- 
lutely structureless. This structureless mass is 
not life itself, but is the primordial substance in 
which physical life inheres. Life in this proto- 
plasmic mass absorbs nutrient matter, instanta- 
neously changing dead matter into living matter 
by a process which no human science can imitate 
or explain. In this protoplasm the scientists have 
not found life itself, but only its most primitive 
manifestation. No scientist claims that proto- 



84 U\ SETTLED QUESTIONS. 

plasm is life itself. Physical life is the micro- 
scopically invisible power that spins the structure- 
less substance in which it inheres into threads, and 
then weaves the threads into the complicated web 
of vegetable tissue in plants, and of flesh and 
bones and an infinity of organs of coordinated 
designs in animals. And now, in the words of 
Dr. Joseph Cook of Boston, whose ideas and ex- 
pressions we have already begun to use, '' We 
affirm that we have, under the microscope, ocular 
demonstration that it is life that causes organiza- 
tion, and not organization which causes life. . . . 
i^xley says we fail to detect any organization 
m th^ bioplasmic- mass ; but there is movement 
in it -and Hfe. We see the movements; they 
must 'have a cause. The cause of the movements 
must exist before the movements. Life is before 
organization. But if life may exist before organi- 
zation, it may exist after it, or outside it." This 
exposition of the relation of life to organization is 
a masterpiece of reasoning. It means much, but 
we must not draw inferences from it not involved 
in it, as Dr. Joseph Cook seems to do ; the fact 
that Hfe may exist apart from and outside organi- 
zation is no evidence that it may exist apart 



IS MAN AN IMMORTAL SOUL? 85 

from or outside the bioplasmic mass of structure- 
less matter. When the germinal mass in which 
the microscope has discovered the primordial form 
of Hfe is exhausted, then the Hfe, the presence of 
which the microscope has revealed, dies. Phys- 
ical science gives us no evidence that the life 
which the microscope has found in the bioplasmic 
mass can exist apart from the bioplasmic matter 
in which it inheres. All that is here proven is, 
that physical life — the only form of life of whose 
immediate presence the physical eye, however 
aided by magnifying- glasses, can have perception 
— necessarily inheres in a physical substance, 
though it may inhere in its germinal matter prior 
to and after organization. Physical science proves 
that life may exist outside organization, but it does 
not prove that it can exist outside the bioplasmic 
mass in which it is found as an inherent power. 
Life must necessarily inhere in an essence that 
lives. We can no more conceive of life as a thing 
apart from the subject that lives than we can of 
thought as a thing apart from the mind that 
thinks. Physical Hfe is not the harp nor the 
harper, but is the harping of the harp. Life in- 
heres in a living being as thought inheres in a 



86 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

thinking mind. Destroy the being in which Hfe 
inheres, and its Hfe perishes with it. Destroy 
the bioplasmic matter in which physical Hfe in- 
heres, and physical life perishes with it. Dr. 
Cook's celebrated argument, so far as the immor- 
tality of the soul is concerned, goes for nothing. 
It proves nothing that touches the question. It 
goes just as far toward proving the immortality 
of plants and beasts as toward proving that man 
is an immortal soul. The life of man that lives 
after his physical death is not the life of his body, 
but the life of his soul. We know, as a fact of 
experience, that the body dies. But is there a 
psychical life in man that survives his physical 
death ? This is our question. Physical death is 
a fact of physical observation. When a man dies 
physicaHy, he is physically dead. If there be no 
psychical Hfe in man, then physical death ends 
aH. The physical senses of man, and the science 
of physical perception through them, has no power 
to discover the psychical bioplasm in which soul- 
life inheres. The microscope, aiding the physical 
eye of man, cannot discover it, because it is phys- 
ically indiscernible. The search for the evidence 
of man's immortality along the line of the phys- 



IS MAN AN IMMORTAL SOUL? 87 

ical sciences can never be successful, because it is 
a search on the wrong road. Physical science 
can neither prove nor disprove man's psychical 
immortaHty. But there are facts of conscious- 
ness which are not of a physical nature. They 
are not perceivable by external physical observa- 
tion, but are none the less real because they are 
facts of our internal experience. Philosophy 
deals with them just as physical science deals 
with the material facts of external perception. 
Man is conscious of his own distinct self-person- 
ality. How far self-consciousness exists in mere 
animal life we cannot tell with precision. No 
doubt animals are conscious of their existence, 
and of certain physical impressions and impulses. 
If they were free intelligences, possessing the 
discourse of reason, they would find a way of 
expressing their thoughts. Animals do not talk, 
simply because they know nothing to talk about. 
They have modes of expressing all their impres- 
sions. They are not capable of self- reflection 
and introspection. It is in this capacity that 
man's superiority over them begins. Man, by 
his introspection, finds that he is a person sepa- 
rate and distinct from all other persons and things. 



88 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

He knows that he is personally responsible for 
his own individual conduct. Man individualizes 
himself. Man's question is not, Is life immortal, 
but, Is my life immortal? Am I an immortal 
soul ? This question implies two things : the 
possibility of man's immortality, and man's pres- 
ent uncertainty of it. Thought flows from the 
mind as w^ater from a fountain ; and as water 
cannot rise higher than its source, we cannot see 
how the thought of immortality could arise in a 
mind not possibly immortal. But if man had 
present certainty of his immortality, the question 
would be answered and silenced. 

We find the genesis of this question, and also 
its answer implied, in the following facts of hu- 
man consciousness and experience. 

Man knows that he possesses powers of thought 
and action that are capable of indefinite expan- 
sion, and that these powers are never, in this life, 
developed to the full extent of their capacities. 
If physical death ends all, then man's life is never 
a finished existence. It is like a river that never 
reaches its ocean. Man, seeing that his life here 
below ends, if it ends in physical death, as an 
uncompleted thing, Hke a river in mid career 



IS MAN AN IMMORTAL SOUL? 89 

plunging over a precipice, is compelled to ask, 
Does the current of life continue to flow on in 
consciousness and development beyond the preci- 
pice of the death of the body? Man cannot 
bring himself to believe that God has created 
him with capacities and aspirations larger than 
the possibilities of the, present life, and doomed 
his life always and forever to end as an incom- 
plete and unfinished existence. Man's capacity 
for personal immortality is evidence that he has 
been created to be an immortal person. All 
other creatures on earth except man, the highest 
of all, have opportunity in this life to attain unto 
their highest possible development ; it would 
seem, therefore, that man must have life beyond 
the grave in order that he might have opportunity 
to reach the fullness of his being. 

But man not only thinks of immortality, he 
also desires it. This desire is an effect ; and it 
must have a cause. This desire is universal. It 
is found in all sane minds, unless the fear of an- 
ticipated punishment for conscious crimes has 
smothered it ; the cause of it, therefore, must be 
universal in human nature. Whatever is uni- 
versal is natural and necessary. This universal 



90 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

desire for immortality, springing from a universal 
aspiration that is natural to all men in their senses, 
infolds in itself the necessary inference that man 
is an immortal souL If man is not immortal, 
his nature is fallacious and deludes him with false 
hopes. Can nature be false ? Nature is the word 
of God. He spake and it was done. 

Man's consciousness of a conscience infolds and 
impHes in itself the necessity of the continued con- 
sciousness of his self-identity in a future existence. 
If we analyze our conscience, we find that it is not 
only the present director and censor of conduct, 
but also the accredited and recognized prophet of 
certain future retribution for present wrong-do- 
ing. Man's conscience tells him that his present 
and future well-being will follow, unfailingly, 
from right-doing, and that retributive punishment 
will inevitably overtake the wrong-doer. Man, 
under an awakened conscience, is conscious that 
death will not prevent or avert the just retribu- 
tion of his crimes ; therefore, he must conclude 
that death will not end his existence. 

Man's conscience, his own ineradicable sense of 
right and wrong, tells him that God, the moral 
Sovereign of the universe, must be just and 



IS MAN AN IMMORTAL SOUL? 9 1 

righteous in the distribution of rewards and pen- 
alties to his moral creatures. But man looks 
around him in life and sees among men a mani- 
fest inequality in the consequences of the acts of 
this life : sometimes he sees that the guilty go 
unpunished and the innocent are punished ; he 
sees the good in adversity and the wicked in 
prosperity ; he sees falsehood prevailing over 
truth and crime triumphing over innocence. 
Man puts this fact of his observation together 
with the moral datum of his conscience, and the 
two constitute the major and minor premises of a 
syllogism from which the inevitable conclusion 
flows, that there must be a future life for both 
good and bad, in which the God of righteous- 
ness, in the distribution of his rewards and pun- 
ishments, will equalize the manifest inequalities 
and rectify the crying injustices of this present 
life. If there is not a future life for all men in 
which these adjustments shall be made in the 
recompenses of a God of justice, then the uni- 
verse is not under the reign of truth and right- 
eousness, but is in moral anarchy. 

When I said, in a former paragraph of this lect- 
ure, that physical life is not the harper but the 



92 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

music of the harp, did you notice that it was life in 
a qualified sense of which this was said ? There 
is life which is the harper that produces the music 
of concatenated thought and regulated action. It 
is psychical life, which is as much higher than 
physical life as physical life is higher than vege- 
table life. Here life, the living person, is the 
harper, and the psychical and physical natures of 
man are the double harp on which this harper 
plays. The strings of the harp of human life are 
the faculties of internal consciousness and ex- 
ternal perception, and these strings all have their 
rise in the psychical nature of man, but are also 
attached to his physical organism ; and through 
that attachment man comes into touch and com- 
munication with the physical world around him. 

All life is not the same. The plant is a thing 
of life, the beast is a living thing, and man is a 
person that lives. Man lives in the conscious- 
ness of his self-directed thoughts and activities. 
The unconscious life of the vegetable is a harp 
without strings. It is dumb life. There is no 
music in it. The conscious life of beasts is a 
harp with strings, but without a harper to play 
upon them. It is an ^olian harp that gives 



IS MAN AN IMMORTAL SOUL? 93 

forth music only as its strings are moved by the 
winds of ever-changing circumstances blowing 
upon them. Before we can find the harper, 
playing upon a harp of a thousand strings, we 
must pass outside the range of the physical 
sciences and enter the domain of psychical exist- 
ences. Here we find life in a psychical essence, 
a conscious person living and controlling the sub- 
ordinate life of its physical organization, and giv- 
ing self- direction to its own free activities. How 
do we know that there is such a life ? We are 
conscious of it. This testimony of consciousness 
is the end of all controversy. I know that there 
is within my physical organization a psychical 
being — the life of conscious thought and free 
action which is my real self, living and doing. 
Neither plants nor beasts have this Hfe in com- 
mon with me. I know that I am more than a 
mere animal. Now, I may die as an animal, and 
yet live on as a man. I have a double life — a 
life in common with the beasts that perish, and a 
life that elevates me into a whole realm of exist- 
ence above them. The continuance of the higher 
life may not be dependent upon the continued 
existence of the lower life. The higher Hfe of 



94 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

free intelligence and moral responsibility knows, 
on the dicta of its conscience, that it must stand 
in judgment before its God, and there answer for 
the deeds done while in its mortal existence. 
This is the life which constitutes man an immor- 
tal soul. This living person is the harper that 
strikes the strings of the harp of its life and 
brings forth the music of connected thought and 
regulated action. The strings of this harp, as 
we have already said, are, in this mortal exist- 
ence, attached to a physical organization. When 
touched they give forth a double music — the 
music of a psychical and of a physical nature 
united. The double strains of this music are not 
always in harmony. The psychical and physical 
natures are not always attuned in accord with 
one another. For this reason the music of the 
double harp of human Hfe is ofttimes jarring and 
discordant. 

The physical organization of man's mortal life 
may be broken by violence, or may wear out in 
use. When this happens the strings of the harp 
of human life, which have their rise in man's 
psychical nature, are detached from his dead 
physical organization ; but they still remain, well 



IS MAN AN IMMORTAL SOUL? 95 

strung and well tuned, in their indestructible con- 
nection with man's undying psychical organiza- 
tion. The harper, man the immortal soul, lives 
on and holds the harp of life in his hand, and 
henceforth, in a larger and nobler life, he draws 
forth from his imperishable harp a grander and 
sweeter music. 

And now, lastly, it is a law of nature that 
nothing, neither force nor matter, can be abso- 
lutely destroyed. Force, when apparently ex- 
hausted, is only correlated into another form. 
This is known as the doctrine of the persistence 
of force. Matter, when apparently destroyed, 
has only been dissipated, to appear in some 
other forms. There can be no such thing as an- 
nihilation, except by the direct and miraculous 
power of the Great First Cause that called all 
things into existence. This law is universal, and 
is true of psychical essences and powers as well 
as of physical entities and forces. Mind cannot 
cease to exist, any more than matter can. 

Now, matter must exist in space, and mind 
must exist in consciousness. Consciousness is 
the necessary condition of mental existence, as 
impenetrability is the necessary condition of ma- 



96 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

terial existence. Mind without consciousness is 
unthinkable. It is hke trying to think of matter 
existing without occupying space. Absolute un- 
consciousness in mind would be annihilation of 
mind. This is not a new doctrine, nor a doc- 
trine that stands without the support of the very 
highest authority. Sir William Hamilton says : 
*' Kant, that great thinker, distinctly maintains 
that we always dream when asleep ; that to 
cease to dream would be to cease to live ; and 
that those who fancy that they have not dreamt 
have only forgotten their dream." To this the 
great philosopher of common sense adds : '' I 
have myself at different times turned my atten- 
tion to this point, and, as far as my observations 
go, they certainly tend to prove that during sleep 
the mind is never either inactive or wholly un- 
conscious of its activity. As to the objection 
of Locke and others, that, as we have no recol- 
lection of dreaming, we have therefore never 
dreamt, it is sufficient to say that the assumption 
in this argument — that consciousness and the rec- 
ollection of it are convertible — is disproved in the 
most emphatic manner by experience." Sir Will- 
iam Hamilton has proved beyond a doubt that 



IS MAN AN IMMORTAL SOUL? gj 

even in the processes of our reasoning there may 
be latent consciousness. Sleep is a depression of 
external perception, but not a suppression of in- 
ternal consciousness. If the mind was inwardly- 
unconscious, how could it ever be aroused to 
wakefulness again? The physical impressions of 
sound and touch must be reported to a living 
consciousness within the sleeping man, or they 
could never awaken him to outward perception 
and activity. Consciousness in the man asleep 
at night is no more extinct than the life of the 
leafless tree in winter. Dr. George Moore, mem- 
ber of the Royal College of Physicians, says: 
^' The most perfect impediment to the use of the 
body, short of death, is that of apoplectic sleep ; 
but even in it we have reason to believe that the 
mind is often busy in dreaming. Some patients 
who appear perfectly apoplectic have remem- 
bered their dreams; and I have heard an indi- 
vidual, during a severe fit, continue to mutter 
earnestly about things in which he had been pre- 
viously interested, and of which, on recovery, he 
had no recollection.'' From all this it is clear 
that well-known facts of experience attest that 
the mind is sometimes conscious when the body 



98 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

is in profoundest sleep, and if sometimes, it may 
always be so. Experience does not show any- 
thing contrary to the doctrine that the mind is 
always and unceasingly conscious, and all its tes- 
timony goes to the establishment of the doctrine. 
We add to this that consciousness is the evi- 
dence of the existence of mind, and hence is the 
condition of mental existence. If there is sound 
reason in the axiom, I am conscious, therefore I 
am, it follows that the total absence of conscious- 
ness is proof of the non-existence of mind. But 
if it is a necessary conclusion from self-evident 
axioms of thought that consciousness is the con- 
dition of mental existence, how came it to pass 
that any philosophers have ever called the doc- 
trine into question? The answer is that those 
philosophers, with Locke in the lead, have con- 
founded recollection with consciousness. If we 
have never been conscious of anything except 
that which we recollect, then it would follow that 
we have not forgotten, and never can forget, 
anything. But we know that we have forgotten 
many things of which we were once fully con- 
scious. We might be engaged in the contempla- 
tion of other properties of a physical object with- 
out having the attention turned to the fact that 



IS MAN AN IMMORTAL SOUL? 99 

it necessarily occupies space; and so we might 
study the powers of mind without having the 
thought directed to the fact that, if the mind 
exist at all, it must be conscious. But it seems 
clear, the moment that we think of it, that con- 
sciousness is to mind what extension is to mat- 
ter. It follows, then, that absolute unconscious- 
ness, would be mental annihilation. But nothing 
is ever annihilated; therefore, mind is immortal. 
Immortality is as indestructible in mind as ex- 
tension is in matter. You may grind matter into 
its ultimate and infinitesimal atoms, and then 
separate atom from atom, and yet each atom 
would occupy space. Just so, whatever disaster 
may fall upon the mind of man at death, or after 
death, it can never cease to be conscious. 

We now add to this the doctrine of the 
ancients, which the moderns also hold because it 
is irrefutable, that the soul, the living person, is 
an uncompounded and indivisible essence; and 
then it will of necessity follow that man is a cre- 
ated and immortal person. Therefore all men, 
the good and the bad, are naturally immortal. 
The personal immortality of man is inherent in 
the uncompounded and indivisible nature of the 
psychical essence in which his true life inheres. 



lOO UNSETTLED QUESTIONS, 

The conclusion of our philosophy is, that man is 
necessarily an immortal soul. It also follows 
that psychical life is totally different from phys- 
ical life. In the mortal existence of man the two 
are connected in some mysterious way, but they 
are not identical; and consequently, physical 
death does not involve psychical death. There 
can be no psychical death. The psychical es- 
sence is essentially immortal. At physical death 
it is disengaged and disassociated from the 
physical system, and departs into the world of 
pure spirits. What are the conditions and activ- 
ities of life in that world beyond the fact that it 
must be a life of uninterrupted and uninterrupt- 
ible consciousness, we do not know, and we can 
never know, unless God speaks to us and reveals 
the secrets of the life that is to be. Neither 
science nor philosophy can ever discover those se- 
crets. The psychical essence and the mode of its 
life are beyond the reach of the microscope or 
the telescope. The microscope by searching the 
brain cannot find the immortal soul, nor can the 
telescope by scanning the heavens ever discover 
the Eternal God. God the eternal Spirit, and 
man the immortal spirit, are not visible to the 



IS MAN AN IMMORTAL SOUL? lOI 

physical eye, however it may be aided by mag- 
nifying-glasses. But notwithstanding the in- 
ability of the microscope to find the psychical 
essence of man within his physical system, yet 
man is positively conscious of his psychical life 
of self- directing thought and free will, and 
knows that he is a Hving and immortal mind; 
and notwithstanding the failure of the telescope 
to discover God enthroned in some one of the 
countless worlds that roll in space, yet man, the 
immortal person, knows, from the necessity of 
his own nature, and from the constitution of the 
world around him, that there is a living and 
eternal Mind upon the throne of the universe. 
If man with his physical eye, however aided, 
could see himself or his God, that would be 
proof that God is matter and not the eternal 
Mind, and that man is material and not immortal 
mind. I know that I am an immortal soul, 
because I am of an essence that can never die. 
I am a mind, and ceaseless consciousness is the 
condition of mental existence. Only the power 
that created me can destroy my consciousness, 
and that only by the act of absolute annihilation. 



CHAPTER THIRD. 
IS THE BIBLE A DIVINE REVELATION? 



103 



' * TAe Bible professes to be a book from God^ speaks everywhere 
with divine authority, and de7?iands our submission. It is 7iot A 
rule ; it is the rule both of practice and faith. To ascertain its 
meaning, we etnploy reason and the opinions of good men, and the 
experience of a devout heart ; but no one of these helps, nor all 
combined, can be regarded as of coordinate authority. They are 
not parts of the law ; they only help to expound it. To follow rea- 
son or opinions, or inward experience in matters of faith, whe7t 
their decisions contradict the Bible, is to de^iy it: to follow them 
when they add to it, is to ad??iit another revelation ; and to make 
THEM our rule when they agree with it, is to rest our obedience oft 
the wisdom of man, and not on the truth of God.^'* — Joseph 
Angus, D.D. 



104 



THE THIRD QUESTION. 

IS THE BIBLE A DIVINE REVELATION? 

Whatever new truth a man learns as the 
result of his own observation and research is of 
the nature of a discovery. When one person 
communicates to others truths which they did not 
previously know, his communication to them is a 
revelation. The two acts are similar, but not 
identical. In the first, the man in gaining his 
new knowledge is active, but in the second he is 
passive. In the first, he finds out something 
which he did not know before ; he makes a dis- 
covery. In the second, another person tells him 
something which, likewise, he did not know be- 
fore ; he receives a revelation. A man who makes 
a discovery may at once become a revealer, by 
communicating his discovery to others. Sir Isaac 
Newton made a discovery when he thought out 
the cause why the apple fell from the tree ; he 

made a revelation to others when he proclaimed 

105 



Io6 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS, 

and expounded that cause as a law of nature. A 
discoverer lifts a covering and finds what was 
under it; a revealer lifts a veil and shows to 
others what was behind it. 

Applying these definitions to the Bible, the 
question arises, Did the sacred writers by their 
own thought and study reason out and thus dis- 
cover the truths which they have recorded? If 
so, then the Bible is nothing more than a human 
revelation, containing only a record of human 
discoveries ; and, consequently, it has no higher 
authority than that of human thought and reason. 
But if the Bible is a record of a system of truths 
and doctrines which the sacred writers did not 
discover as the result of their own observation 
and reason, but which was communicated to 
them by the Spirit of the living God, then it is 
a divine revelation, and, as such, has divine au- 
thority over the thoughts and actions of men. 
If the Bible is a revelation from God to men, 
given through men to whom God revealed him- 
self, then it is God's Word inspired in men's 
words. A divine revelation is a communication 
from the divine Mind to the human mind of a 
knowledge of divine truths which the human 



IS THE BIBLE A DIVINE REVELATION? 107 

mind, by the ordinary exercise of its powers of 
observation and reason, could never have dis- 
covered. 

We open the Bible and find that it contains a 
great mass of matter that is purely historical and 
biographical, and which could have been dis- 
covered by human observation and inquiry ; and 
in many places the record itself implies that the 
sacred writers did learn many of the facts by 
their own observation, and from various sources 
of human information. Is the presence of such 
matter in the Bible incompatible with the hy- 
pothesis that, taken as a whole, it is a divine 
revelation ? We think not. It may be that such 
facts are recited in order that the divine truths 
infolded in them might be brought out and re- 
vealed unto men. In revealing the law of gravi- 
tation the fact that an apple fell from a tree to 
the ground is mentioned not that men might 
know that an apple had thus fallen, but that men 
might be enabled to understand the law of nature 
that made the apple fall. Just so many events 
of human history are recorded in the volume of 
divine inspiration not that they might be known 
as human history pure and simple, but that the 



Io8 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

presence and purpose of a divine government 
concealed in human history might be unveiled 
and revealed to men. The Bible is not meant to 
be a history of the origin and development of the 
human race, nor of a particular family of the 
human race and of its development into a chosen 
nation, but is meant to be a revelation of God's 
moral relations to the race and of his purpose in 
all human events. 

In order that God's presence in a moral gov- 
ernment over men, and the grand purpose of that 
government, might be revealed, it was necessary 
that the volume of divine revelation should con- 
tain a recital of certain grand facts of human his- 
tory and of certain minute facts of the personal 
history of certain individuals. Therefore, the fact 
that the Bible contains a recital of many historical 
and biographical events is not incompatible with 
the hypothesis that it is, from beginning to end, 
a divine revelation, revealing the presence and 
purpose of God as a moral Sovereign in all hu- 
man events, great and small. The divine revela- 
tion does not consist in the recital of the human 
events which the sacred writers might have 
known, and many of which no doubt they did 



IS THE BIBLE A DIVINE REVELATION? 109 

know, as the result of human observation and 
reason, but in the unfolding of the divine pur- 
pose involved in and underlying them — a fact 
which the human reason, unenlightened by the 
divine Spirit, could never have discovered. The 
presence and power of God as Creator and Pre- 
server are manifested in his works, but the inten- 
tions and purposes of God as the moral Governor 
and Redeemer of the human race can be known 
only as they are revealed in the declarations of 
his Word. 

In the same way men reveal themselves to one 
another in their works and by their words. A 
man's moral intentions and purposes in life, and 
the motives that shape and control his conduct, 
may be inferred from his works, but can never 
be fully and certainly known unless they be also 
declared in words. When a man declares what 
the purpose of his life is, and unfolds the plan on 
which he is working out that purpose, then there- 
after his works are to be interpreted in the light 
of his words. The verbal revelation is to be 
thrown back over his past life, and the intention 
and purpose of all his actions are to be read in 
its light. If that revelation is found to be in ac- 



no UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

cord with the logical trend of his conduct, its 
truth is thereby confirmed, and his conduct, in 
points where it could not before be understood, 
is also thereby explained. When a man has once 
declared the plan and purpose of his life, we have 
henceforth of that man a double revelation — an 
unavoidable revelation made by his works and a 
voluntary and explanatory revelation given in his 
words. 

The verbal revelation may be made to a chosen 
few, and by them be imparted to others, either 
verbally or in writing, or in both forms. When 
a man thus reveals himself to others we have a 
human revelation of the plan and purpose of a 
human life. 

An earthly sovereign, a president, or a gov- 
ernor may thus reveal the plan and purpose of 
his administration to his subjects. When such a 
revelation is made it is usually imparted to chosen 
ministers, and by them declared to others whom 
it may concern. In such declarations there may 
be the recital of many events of a historical 
nature which were well known as facts before 
the revealer declared them; but it may have 
been necessary to repeat them in unfolding the 



IS THE BIBLE A DIVINE REVELATION? Ill 

plan and in explaining the purpose of the gov- 
ernment and the mode of its administration. In 
such a revelation it may also be necessary to an- 
nounce beforehand future works embraced in the 
plan and purpose of the revealer. 

A governor may have good reasons for making 
such a revelation of the plan and purpose of his 
government to his own citizens, or at least to a 
portion of them, so that those for whose good he 
is working might cooperate with him in the ex- 
ecution of his plans. He might also have good 
reasons for making only a partial revelation of his 
plan and purpose, and that only to a select few ; 
for, if his intentions were all known, or were 
known to all, enemies and opponents might hin- 
der his work, or even defeat his purpose. 

Now, has God, as the Sovereign of the uni- 
verse, made such a revelation of himself to man ? 
If the Bible is a book in which the plan and pur- 
pose of God's moral government over men is un- 
folded, then it is a divine revelation ; and if it is 
a divine revelation, it is God's Word spoken unto 
men. 

Can God thus speak unto men, as one person 
speaks unto other persons? 



112 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

We have found that God is the self-existent 
and eternal Person, and that man is a created 
and immortal person. There is, then, a plurality 
of persons. 

When two persons meet they are capable of 
communication with one another. Persons can 
exchange their thoughts. When beasts meet 
they make mutual impressions upon one another. 
Man can, to a hmited extent, convey the impres- 
sions of his thoughts to beasts, and can, from 
their expressions and motions, infer to some ex- 
tent the impressions that are influencing them. 
But a real conversation between men and beasts 
is not possible. .Conversation impHes that dis- 
course of reason which belongs only to free in- 
telligences. A person is a free intelligence — one 
that thinks and directs his life by his thoughts. 

The intercommunication of free intelligences 
does not depend upon a language of w^ords. 
Oral language is the outgrowth of personal inter- 
communication. It is an advanced mode by 
which persons communicate their thoughts to 
one another. Written language is a still more 
advanced mode of personal intercommunication. 
It is the mode of communicating thoughts to 



IS THE BIBLE A DIJ/INE REVELATION? II3 

those not present to hear the voice of speech. 
Two persons who have not a single word of lan- 
guage in common may exchange their thoughts 
by signs. When two foreigners meet who have 
not one word of language in common, it is not 
like the meeting of two beasts, nor of a man and 
a beast. 

Now, as God is the eternal Person and man is 
a created person, and as the power of intercom- 
munication is a condition of personal existence, 
it follows that there can be an intercommunica- 
tion of thoughts between God and man. God 
can speak to man, and man can comprehend his 
voice. There may be physical and metaphysical 
difficulties in the way of our clear comprehension 
of the mode of intercommunication between the 
infinite Mind and our finite minds, but we know 
that God can speak to men because he is a Per- 
son and men are persons. It is not incumbent 
upon us to show how the Infinite communicates 
with the finite ; if we show the fact that there is 
communication between us and our God, that 
will be the end of the controversy. That there 
Is such intercommunication between God and 
man is implied in every class of evidence that 



114 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

proves that there is a God, and that man is a 
person capable of knowing himself, and of know- 
ing that he is a responsible creature, bound to 
reverence and obey the God that made him. 

God has spoken to man in external nature. 
He has written his thoughts upon the works of 
his hands, and revealed himself in the laws of 
nature. In the external works of nature thought 
and forethought are everywhere obvious ; in in- 
ternal consciousness the personal intelligence of 
the Creator is revealed to man's intellect; and, 
above all, in his conscience man knows himself to 
be the lawful subject of his Creator, who reigns 
over him as the moral Sovereign of his life. As 
God has spoken to man in all these ways, who 
will say that he cannot speak to him in words, as 
man speaks to man? He gave man his power 
of speech ; then, are we to say that he cannot 
speak to the speaker whom he has made ? 

But man needs to know more of his God and 
of himself than he can learn from himself and the 
external world around him. Man, in his present 
condition, is conscious that his knowledge of God 
and of his own duty and destiny is imperfect and 
insufficient. His conscience tells him that he is 



IS THE BIBLE A DIVINE REVELATION? II5 

under a moral law which he has violated. Man 
knows in his conscience that in the sight of his 
moral Sovereign he is a sinner. This conscious- 
ness of sin is as universal as the race. Man 
knows that he has fallen from his true place in 
relation to his God. His conscience tells him 
this, but his reason fails to inform him how he 
came to fall away from his God, or how he can 
be restored to his favor. There is no voice in 
nature that speaks of mercy. Conscience says, 
Sin must be punished. There is no Hght in 
nature that reveals to man, conscious of sin and 
guilt, a possible way of restoration to the favor 
of God, whose moral law he knows he has vio- 
lated. If God does not speak to man in a new 
revelation, showing a way of forgiveness and sal- 
vation, then man is shut up, in the misery of his 
sin, to endless despair. Will God speak to man, 
and show him a way of salvation ? We cannot say 
in advance what God will do ; but we ask. Has 
God thus spoken to man? This is our question. 
Now, here is a Book ''which claims God for 
its author, truth for its contents, and salvation for 
its end.'' This Book claims to be the Word of 
God inspired in the words of men. It claims 



Il6 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS, 

to reveal to man how he came to be a sinner, 
and to unfold to him the divine provision for 
his redemption from sin. It claims to reveal the 
divine plan for man's salvation through the 
atonement of Jesus Christ our Lord. We call 
this book the Bible — the Book. This Book is 
written in human language, but it claims to be 
the Word of God breathed into the words of 
men. We find in it such declarations as these : 
*' Hear ye the Word of the Lord; Thus saith the 
Lord ; The Word of the Lord came unto me say- 
ing.'' From such expressions it is evident that 
the writers of this Book claimed that they were 
inspired to write what they wrote ; that is, that 
the Word of God is inspired in their words. 
This claim must be wholly true or wholly false. 
There can be no middle ground. It is like a 
banknote, wholly genuine or wholly counterfeit. 
This Bible is either God's truth or man's He. It 
cannot be half one and half the other. This is 
the issue concerning this Book. It is placed on 
trial, not for alleged errors, slight or grave, but 
for its very existence. If its .high claim cannot 
be fully established, it must be given up in toto. 
The Bible is on trial for its life. 



IS THE BIBLE A DIVINE REVELATION-^ II7 

We believe that the Bible is what it claims to 
be, first, because, if true, it fills a place in man's 
life which his conscious necessities demand should 
be filled, and which no other known work can 
fill. Man is just as conscious of his sinful condi- 
tion as he is of his existence. The Bible alone 
tells him how he came to be a sinner, and un- 
folds a divine plan of mercy and salvation for 
sinful men. This is what man needs, above all 
things, to know, and what is nowhere else dis- 
coverable. This creates a strong presumption in 
favor of its genuineness and truth. It fills a 
conscious void in man's life, and solves a problem 
for which no other solution can be found. When 
we have a bolted lock, and one furnishes us a 
key that fits into it and turns back the bolts, we 
conclude at once that we have the right key for 
that lock. If no other key can be found that fits 
that lock, and no other lock which that key fits, 
then we conclude that we have the very key 
that was made for that lock. The Bible fits into 
the moral necessities of man's life, and explains 
their mysteries, which, otherwise, are inexpli- 
cable. It must be a book given for this very 
purpose. 



Il8. UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

If the Bible, which so admirably explains the 
great mystery of human life, is not what it claims 
to be, the Word of God inspired in the words 
of men, then it is wholly a human fabrication. 
If it is the fabrication of men, it must be either 
the work of good men who mistakenly thought 
that they were inspired of God to write what 
they wrote, or the conscious and willful fraud of 
men who knowingly palmed off on men, as God's 
Word, what they knew at the time were only 
their own unauthorized words. Can either of 
these hypotheses be sustained? We think not. 

We must remember that the Bible is not one 
book, but a library of books written by different 
men — men very unlike one another, living at 
great intervals of time from one another during a 
period of more than fifteen hundred years — and 
that there were more than thirty of these writers. 
When we remember these facts, it is simply im- 
possible for us to believe that the sixty-six books 
of the Bible were thus composed by sincere men 
who were deluded enthusiasts and dreamers. It 
might be possible for one man, or even for one 
set of men associated together under a passing 
wave of enthusiasm, to imagine that God was 



IS THE BIBLE A DIVINE REVELATION} Iig 

Speaking in their words when he was not ; but it 
is impossible for us to imagine that the more 
than thirty human authors of the Bible, so widely 
separated from one another in time, and so dif- 
ferent from each other in character and station in 
life, could possibly have been the dupes of their 
own imaginations. It is still more impossible for 
us to believe that our Bible is the conscious fraud 
of conscienceless hypocrites. It might be pos- 
sible for one set of men, working together, to 
fabricate and palm off on mankind a great liter- 
ary fraud ; but it is impossible for us to imagine 
that one set of men after another should take up 
the same fraud, knowing it to be a fraud, and 
perpetuate it from one generation to another. 

We must add to this that the Bible, from be- 
ginning to end, inculcates the moral obligation of 
truth and sincerity, and that the authors of our 
sacred books lived lives of great self-denial, and 
some of them died in martyrdom, in attestation 
of the truth of what they taught. It is just sim- 
ply impossible to believe that they were wicked 
men, hypocrites and deceivers. Such persons as 
Moses, Paul, and Jesus were not self-deluded en- 
thusiasts, nor conscious hypocrites, trying to de- 



I20 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

ceive others. The reason can more readily be- 
lieve everything in the Bible in the most literal 
and realistic sense of the words, than believe that 
the human authors of its various books were 
either self-deceived enthusiasts or hypocrites try- 
ing to deceive others. 

Then, can we suppose that our sacred books 
were written by men who never intended that they 
should be interpreted in a literal sense, but should 
be read as fables and fairy stories, originally in- 
tended to teach great moral lessons ? This hypoth- 
esis is confronted at the start by two insurmount- 
able obstacles; the writers themselves claimed 
that the Lord spoke through them, and that they 
recorded facts and not fancies, and that, too, under 
the infallible guidance of a divine inspiration. 
We cannot avoid the alternatives, the Bible is 
what it claims to be, the Word of God inspired 
in the words of men, or it is the production of 
devout enthusiasts who were self-deluded, or it 
is the forgery of designing men who sought to 
deceive mankind. We have seen that neither of 
the latter views is tenable. We cannot account 
for the existence of the Bible on any other rea- 
sonable hypothesis than that it is a divine revela- 



IS THE BIBLE A DIVINE REVELATIONS 121 

tion from God to men, the Word of God written 
in the words of men. 

We have not alluded to the mythical hypoth- 
esis of Strauss nor to Renan's legendary theory, 
because they are now dead, having been thrust 
through and through by the keen blade of mod- 
ern scholarship. We now know, for a certainty, 
that the Epistles of St. Paul were in circulation 
in the year 60 A.D., less than thirty years after 
the cruel death of the divine Founder of Chris- 
tianity. It is impossible to suppose that the 
story of our gospel in that short time could have 
grown up as a myth or a legend. Strauss lived 
to be present at the funeral of his mythical hy- 
pothesis, and exclaimed in bitter disappointment, 
'' Criticism has run all to leaves." Of his theory 
there is nothing now left but a handful of dead 
leaves. Long before Renan died Professor Dor- 
ner said of Renan's '' Life of Jesus," ''Das ist 
Nichts'' ('^That is nothing"). The mythical 
and legendary theories of Strauss and Renan 
have no longer any influence except with a few 
belated inquirers who walk at least twenty-five 
years behind the progress of real scholarship. 
The criticism of the present day does not count 



122 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS, 

them in the field as Hving antagonists to Chris- 
tianity. They are refuted and dead issues. 

The attention of scholars is just now engaged 
with what is known as the ''higher criticism." 
This term is very indefinite, and covers a very 
widespreading ramification of topics. The terms 
'' higher" and ''lower" as defining criticism may 
refer to the methods of criticism or to the objects 
criticised. In the old definition of the term, 
"lower criticism" had reference to the genuine- 
ness or spuriousness of single words or letters, 
and the "higher criticism" had reference to the 
genuineness or spuriousness of whole sentences, 
paragraphs, or chapters. And as defined by 
methods, the " lower criticism " determines the 
question of genuineness by external historical 
evidence, and the "higher criticism" by internal 
evidence, such as " the language, style of com- 
position, archaeological and historical traces, the 
conception of the author respecting the various 
subjects of human thought, and the like." There- 
fore, the questions of the " higher criticism " 
open such a wide field of inquiry, a field in 
which the pathways of research are so multitudi- 
nous in their various ramifications that it is ut- 



IS THE BIBLE A DIVWE REVELATION? 1 23 

terly impossible for us to enter it in this course 
of lectures. To be satisfactorily handled, it must 
have a course of lectures all to itself. 

The higher criticism does not deny that the 
Bible is the Word of God in the words of men, 
but undertakes to say that certain paragraphs in 
various books of the sacred volume as we now 
possess it do not belong to the Book as a part of 
the original divine revelation; and hence, that 
the Bible, at least as we now have it, is not iner- 
rant. It also undertakes to say that certain ones 
of our sacred books, or that certain portions of 
some of them, were not written by the persons 
whose names are now attached to them as their 
authors, and hence there are errors in our pres- 
ent Bible that have crept in through the igno- 
rance and imperfections of the men who collected 
and edited the various books as we now have 
them. These errors are to be detected and ex- 
pugned by human criticism. 

This theory of speculative scholarship should 
not disturb our faith in the inerrant validity 
of God's Word, because it is now found to be 
a web of linguistic speculation, woven of fine 
threads of brilliant fancies that are continually 



124 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

breaking at the touch of historical facts that the 
pen of true scholarship and the spade of explo- 
ration are constantly bringing to light. These 
higher critics are sometimes discomfited by an 
external historical fact springing up suddenly 
and oversetting their finespun theories — remind- 
ing one of the story of the ornithologist who 
stood before the window of a curiosity shop, 
criticising the fancied malformation of what he 
supposed to be a stuffed owl, when, in the midst 
of his criticism, while he was ridicuHng the un- 
skillfulness of the taxidermist, the owl, solemnly 
lifting up its head, hooted at him, ''Who! who! 
who are you?" Let one illustration suffice. 
Luke, in Acts 13:7, speaks of Sergius Paulus as 
''proconsul" of Cyprus. If Cyprus was at the 
time of Paul's visit to that island an imperial 
province and not a senatorial district, the title of 
the governor should be "propraetor" and not 
"proconsul." Now both Strabo and Dion Cas- 
sius say Cyprus was an imperial province, and 
therefore, said the critics, Luke was in error as 
to the proper title of Sergius Paulus. This criti- 
cism prevailed and had its influence for a num- 
ber of years. But now it turns out, on the fur- 



IS THE BIBLE A DIVINE REVELATION? 12$ 

ther testimony of Dion Cassius himself, that the 
Emperor Augustus did hold Cyprus for a while 
as an imperial province, but that afterward it 
was made a senatorial district, and that it was 
such at the time of Paul's visit ; and so the 
proper official title of the governor was at the 
time ''proconsul," as Luke gives it, and not 
*' propraetor," as the learned critics contended it 
should have been. And confirming the absolute 
historical accuracy of Luke, coins have been 
found on the island on which its rulers are called 
''proconsuls," and one of them, found by Gen- 
eral Cesnola, bears the inscription, " in the pro- 
consulship of Paulus." Thus, not only in this 
case, but in a multitude of other cases, recent 
discoveries in Bible-lands have thrown the so- 
called higher critics into discomfiture and dis- 
grace. We are even now justified in claiming 
that the Bible fits into the Bible-lands, historic- 
ally, geographically, and topographically, just as 
a peculiar picture fits into its own peculiar frame 
in which no other picture can be made to fit. 

God has given us two great volumes of revela- 
tion — his Word and his Works. Both of these 
books are addressed to the reason, and both re- 



126 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

quire thought and study in order to discover 
their deep meaning. In neither are the facts of 
the revelation separated and classified. The facts 
belonging to different departments of thought 
are intermixed and commingled. The facts of 
geology, botany, zoology, and so on, are com- 
mingled and scattered over the whole face of the 
earth. So in the Written Word the facts of cre- 
ation, of sin, of redemption, of faith, of repent- 
ance, and so on through all the departments of 
religious thought, are scattered and commingled 
throughout all the books. The revelations of 
theology are not given in systems written out in 
separate books and chapters. Man must dis- 
criminate, separate, and classify, and thus form 
his own systems of doctrines and duties. God 
reveals himself in both of the great books in the 
same manner and order, but there are revelations 
in each volume not contained in the other. The 
Word and Works of God are not two editions of 
the same volume, but are one book in two vol- 
umes. The contents of the volumes are for the 
most part different, but in no part contradictory. 
They are not identical, but are complementary 
to one another. The harmony of the two great 



IS THE BIBLE A DIVINE REVELATION? 1 27 

volumes consists, not in the sameness of their 
contents, but in the absence of discord and dis- 
agreement. Between the Bible and science there 
is no appearance of contradiction except in points 
held in controversy on one side or the other, or 
on both sides. Where the facts of Scripture and 
the facts of science are both clearly apprehended 
and understood there is perfect harmony, or, 
what amounts to the same thing, total absence 
of disharmony. Their fields lie apart, touching 
only at given points. Where they touch they 
harmonize, and in their separation there is no 
disharmony. The Works are for the most part a 
revelation of material things, and the Word is a 
revelation of spiritual truths. 

The Bible is a revelation from God to man, 
principally teaching him the things necessary for 
him to know which he cannot learn from the 
light of nature. It is given in the words of men, 
and is addressed to the reason. It reveals truths 
which man could not reason out, but which, on 
their presentation, his reason apprehends and ap- 
proves. In this respect it is different from all 
other books. It is an inspired book ; not in the 
sense in which the poems of Shakespeare, Milton, 



128 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

and Homer are inspired, but in a far more ex- 
alted sense. In poetic inspiration the loftiest 
flight of a man's own thoughts are caught and 
enchained in words. The inspiration of Script- 
ure is of a different nature entirely from this. 
The sacred writers were not lifted up into an ex- 
altation of human thought, but the thoughts of 
God were inspired — breathed into their words. 
There may have been an exaltation of human 
thought, but that was not the divine inspiration 
that makes what they wrote the Word of God 
in the words of men. It is not essential that 
we should understand the mode of inspiration. 
Somehow, God communicated his Word — the 
divine thought — to certain chosen men, so that 
they received it with infallible certainty, and re- 
corded it with infalHble accuracy. But it was 
the men and not their pens that were inspired. 
There is therefore a human element, as well as a 
divine element, in every sentence and word of 
Holy Writ. The individual and personal charac- 
teristics of the different inspired writers are dis- 
cernible, and can be traced in their respective 
writings. The Bible, then, is the Word of God 
inspired — inbreathed — in the words of men. To 



IS THE BIBLE A DIVINE REVELATION? 1 29 

compare great things with small, as Milton so 
often says, we can get an illustration of divine 
inspiration from those writings of Plato in which 
he claims to give the thoughts of Socrates in his 
own words, claiming that Socrates was speaking 
through him. If the Phaedo and the Phaedrus 
are indeed what they claim to be, they were in- 
spired in the mind of Plato by the mind of Soc- 
rates. They contain the word of Socrates in the 
words of Plato. In this way, but in a more per- 
fect degree, the divine Mind inspired the human 
minds of Moses, Matthew, Paul, and all the other 
prophets, evangelists, and apostles, so that God's 
Word is breathed into their human words. In 
the Written Word the divine thought and human 
thought are united in one expression, just as in 
the Incarnate Word the divine nature and the 
human nature are united in one person. The 
two are distinct, but inseparable. The question 
of the inerrancy of the Written Word is the same 
as that of the impeccability of the Incarnate 
Word. The divine nature of Jesus the Christ is 
absolutely impeccable, and his human nature was 
made impeccable by its union with the divine; 
so the Word of God is absolutely inerrant, and 



I30 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

the human words in which it was inbreathed 
were made inerrant by the divine inspiration. 
The human words in which the divine Word is 
inspired are the finite and translatable element. 
There could be no error in the original words. 
In their meaning when selected, and as used by 
the inspired penmen, they expressed the divine 
thought with absolute precision and accuracy, as 
far as it is possible for divine ideas to be ex- 
pressed in human symbols. This leaves no room 
for error as to facts or doctrines, but the human 
words may have been inadequate to express the 
fullness of the divine thought. There is absolute 
inerrancy in the truth taught, though there may 
be inadequacy in the human utterance in which 
it is expressed. St. Paul seems to have been 
conscious of the inadequacy of human w^ords to 
contain the divine Word, and hence he some- 
times used double superlatives. When caught 
up into heaven he heard divine words absolutely 
unutterable in human words. Then, again, the 
divine Word, inspired in human words, has power 
to expand and enlarge their meaning. The di- 
vine Logos, incarnated in the human nature of 
the Man Christ Jesus, expanded and uplifted his 



IS THE BIBLE A DIVINE REVELATION? 131 

manhood beyond all possible development of any 
mere human life. We have said the human 
words in which the divine Word is inspired is a 
finite element, and that it is translatable and 
transmissible. The Bible is the most translat- 
able book in human language. In the tran- 
scriptions and translations of uninspired men 
errors may have crept in. Such errors are to 
be sought out by critical research, comparing 
Scripture with Scripture and with all other 
known and unquestioned and unquestionable 
truths. Here is a field for human criticism, but 
it must confine itself to the inquiries. What con- 
stitutes the divine Word ? and, What do the hu- 
man words in which it is inspired mean in the 
sense belonging to them when they were di- 
vinely selected ? Beyond these limits biblical crit- 
icism has no field. But this is a wide field. Let 
it be devoutly, humbly, and fearlessly cultivated. 
We will not shun criticism. We are not bibli- 
olaters. We do not worship the Bible, but the 
God of the Bible, who has given us his Word in 
our words to teach us how to worship him in the 
right way. 

The Bible is not the source of our religion, 



132 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

but is an inspired record of the great truths of 
our religion as revealed from God to men, and 
of the experiences of those persons and peoples 
into whose lives these divine truths have pene- 
trated. Religion came first, and the Bible fol- 
lowed. It did not, as a written record, all come 
at one time; it has been given at different 
times, through different men, who lived at long 
intervals from one another during a period of 
more than fifteen hundred years. It is the out- 
growth of religion ; but, manifestly, from its har- 
mony and unity from beginning to end, it is all 
one stream of thought, flowing out of one and 
the same fountain of divine thought. It is the 
Word of the one only living God breathed into 
the words of many different men. 

Now, here is a Book composed of sixty-six 
different books, written by more than thirty dif- 
ferent authors, a book that was written at differ- 
ent intervals through a period of more than 
fifteen hundred years, and there is in it a con- 
sistency of contents, a harmony of thought, and 
a unity of purpose, marvelous to consider, which 
unify all the parts and divisions of this Book of 
books so that it stands forth, connected and com-. 



IS THE BIBLE A DIVINE REVELATION} 1 33 

pleted, as the production of one mind, consistent 
and concordant from beginning to end. Can this 
Book, which claims to be the Word of God in 
the words of men, be anything else than what 
it claims to be? Suppose that thirty odd men 
bearing blocks of marble with a disconnected let- 
ter inscribed upon each of them, in all sixty-six 
pieces, unequally distributed among them, should 
come into this hall, not together but one after 
another, and at unequal intervals, and that the 
first should lay down the blocks he brings in a 
certain order and go out, and the second should 
lay his piece or pieces in a certain order on those 
he found and go out, and so on until the last one 
appeared and placed his block in its place ; and 
that then we should look at the pile of marble 
blocks and find that they formed a perfect cross 
with the likeness of the Son of Man hanging on 
it, and that the letters on the sixty-six blocks 
combined and composed the sentence, '' Death 
came into the world by sin, but life through the 
Man Christ Jesus crucified." Now, suppose that 
I should tell you that those thirty odd men had 
acted independently of each other, that neither 
knew what the others were doing, and that each 



134 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

had shaped his own marble blocks, and inscribed 
upon each the letter that his own unprompted 
fancy had suggested, and that the cross and the 
form on it, and the sentence which the combined 
letters composed, had all resulted from chance, 
without a comparison of thought or a conspiracy 
of purpose; — would you beheve me? Could 
you believe me? You could not. You would 
be obliged to say, Such a thing is impossible. 
But suppose I should tell you, and the thirty 
odd men should confirm my word, that those 
men had indeed acted independently of each 
other, but that they had, each separately, acted 
under the control and direction of my thought ; 
that I had sent to each one in his own distant 
home the exact pattern of the block or blocks of 
marble I desired him to prepare, and of the let- 
ter to be inscribed on each block ; and that they 
had brought the blocks in the time and order 
which I had prescribed, and laid them upon one 
another as I had directed ; and that they had done 
all this, each doing his own part without know- 
ing what the others had done or were to do ; and 
that the result was not the outcome of their dis- 
connected thoughts and disjointed works, but 



IS THE BIBLE A DIVINE REVELATION? 1 35 

was the result of my own mind, unifying and 
controlling the works of thirty odd men so as to 
work out the purpose formed in my own mind, 
and never fully explained to any one of the 
workmen. You could understand that. You 
could believe it. It is a reasonable explanation. 
You would then say, That cross with its image 
and its inscription is the work of one mind ex- 
pressed in the works of many minds, all unified 
in the expression of one purpose. No other im- 
aginable explanation could be received as rational 
and satisfactory. That is just what our Bible is 
— the Word of God inspired in the words of 
many men. It is one Book composed of sixty- 
six different books, written by thirty odd differ- 
ent writers ; and when all the books of this Book 
are combined into one, we have erected before 
us the Cross of Calvary and the Saviour of the 
world dying on It; and in the divine record, a 
revelation of man's sin and fall, and of his re- 
demption and salvation through Jesus Christ the 
crucified. Is this the work of men, scheming 
not together, but working independently of each 
other, at long intervals apart, for a period of 
more than fifteen hundred years? Impossible! 



136 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

It is the work of one Mind, directing and guid- 
ing all the minds which worked out the divine 
plan. This Book of books, thus written, is what 
it claims to be, the Word of God inspired in the 
words of men, revealing how man came to be a 
sinner, and that Jesus Christ is his only but all- 
sufficient Saviour. *' Whosoever believeth in him 
shall be saved.*' 



CHAPTER FOURTH. 
IS CHRIST A LIVING SAVIOUR? 



137 



"// ought to be placed in the forefrojit of all Christian teaching 
that Christ'' s mission to eai'th was to give men Life. '/ ain 
come,'' he said, ^ that ye 7/iight have Life, and that ye might 
have it more abimdantly .'' And that he meant literal Life, 
literal, spiritual, and eternal Life, is clear fro7ii the whole course 
of his teaching aitd acting. To impose a 7netaphorical viea7iing 
on the cojjimonest zvord of the N'ew Testamoit is to violate eveiy 
canon of interpretatio7i, a7id at the sa7ne ti77ie to cha7ge the greatest 
of teache7's 7oith persistently 77iystifyi7ig his hearers 7vith the im- 
us7ial use of a7i exact woi'd, arid that 07i the 7nost 7no7ne7itoiis sub- 
ject of which he ever spoke to men,'*'' — Professor Henry 
Drummond. 



138 



THE FOURTH QUESTION. 

IS CHRIST A LIVING SAVIOUR? 

Christianity is the religion that is revealed 

and unfolded in the Bible. If the Bible is a 

divine revelation, as we have seen that it is, then 

Jesus of Nazareth, the founder of Christianity, 

was more than a great moral teacher like Socrates 

or Zeno : he was God's Eternal Son, come down 

from the skies not to open a new school among 

men, but to establish a kingdom — the kingdom 

of heaven on earth. Christ is greater than Moses 

not because he was a deeper thinker, or a more 

logical reasoner, or a wiser reformer, who hit upon 

a plan better adapted for civilizing the world, but 

because he appeared among men as a divine 

Saviour, come down from heaven to earth, not 

for the temporal civilization of men, but for their 

eternal salvation. Christ Jesus came into the 

world not only to teach ignorant men and to give 

light to darkened minds, but also to save lost 

139 



140 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

men, to give life to dead souls. He must not 
only show the truth, but must also give new 
eyes to see the truth. The darkness that covers 
the souls of men is not that darkness that is 
caused by the absence of light, but the darkness 
that is caused by the want of eyes to see in the 
light. The light shineth in darkness, but the 
darkness comprehendeth it not. Jesus came to 
give life, and thus to open the eyes of the dead. 
In him was life, and the life was the light of 
men. The life in Christ is not derived and de- 
pendent life ; in him is the fountain of self-exist- 
ent and self-subsisting life. He came into the 
world as a living Saviour that men might have 
life, and that they might have it more abundantly. 
Only the lost can be saved. In what respect 
is man a lost creature? He is in the world. He 
is in possession of natural senses. He thinks, he 
feels, he reasons, and he acts. He is physically 
and mentally alive. Yet he is a lost being. 
What has he lost? He has lost his spiritual life. 
He is spiritually dead. Christ came into the 
world as the Saviour of men, to restore to them 
that spiritual life which the race once possessed, 
but which has been lost in the sin and fall of the 



IS CHRIST A LIVING SAVIOUR? 14I 

race. He came as our Saviour not merely to re- 
store this life, but also to develop in men a larger 
and fuller measure of it than that which man had 
originally possessed. Hence, Christ came into 
the world not merely as a great moral teacher 
and reformer, but as the divine Life- Restorer — 
the Saviour who saves men by restoring spiritual 
life to their spiritually dead souls. The imparta- 
tion of this spiritual life to the dead soul is called 
a second birth. Ye must be born again. The 
soul must be born again into the spiritual life 
which the race once possessed, but which by sin 
has been lost. This new life is a birth, not from 
the womb of eternity, but from the tomb of time. 
It is the soul's resurrection from the grave of 
sin, and its restoration to the life of holiness. To 
do this great work the world must have a forever 
living Saviour — not merely a Saviour that once 
lived on earth, but a Saviour that now lives, and 
has lived forever, by virtue of life inherent and 
indestructible in himself. Such a Saviour human 
philosophy cannot find. But the Bible, which, 
we have seen, is a divine revelation, reveals to 
us Jesus Christ as the living Saviour of the dead 
world. This great fact is the soul of the Bible, 



142 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

and all else contained in it is the body incorporat- 
ing this soul. Take Christ out of the Bible and 
what would be left would be a dead book. Its 
histories, prophecies, laws, doctrines, and devo- 
tions all relate to a personal Redeemer, and are 
all explanatory, directly or indirectly, of his divine 
mission and work on earth for the redemption of 
man from the death of sin. The Bible is the lit- 
erature of the Jewish nation, containing its his- 
tory, its laws, its forms of worship, its doctrines, 
its devotions, its poetry, its romances, its rhapso- 
dies, and an account of its relations to surround- 
ing, nations; but Jesus Christ, the Messiah of the 
Jews and the Saviour of the world, is the great 
personal outcome of the Jewish nation. He is, 
therefore, the hero of the book of Jewish litera- 
ture, the center to which the Old Testament con- 
verges and from which the New Testament 
emerges. Christianity is the outcome of Judaism 
— is Judaism stripped of its conventional cere- 
monies and national limitations. The history of 
Judaism is the beginning of the history of Chris- 
tianity. The Bible is entirely and exclusively a 
Jewish book. There is not a single Hne in it, not 
even in the New Testament, that was not written 



IS CHRIST A LIVING SAVIOUR} 1 43 

by a Jew. While I say this, I am well aware 
that some able writers hold that Luke was a 
Gentile, basing their opinion on Col. 4 : 11, 14. 
But there is no evidence that the Luke there men- 
tioned as '' the beloved physician '' was the same 
Luke who wrote the third Gospel and the Acts 
of the Apostles ; and even if he was, the passage 
does not exclude him from those of the circum- 
cision any more than it does from those who were 
'' fellow- workers '' with Paul '' unto the kingdom 
of God.*' If Luke had been a Gentile, surely 
some more definite intimation of the fact would 
have fallen out in his own writings or in the Epis- 
tles of Paul. He was one of the earliest converts, 
and it seems almost certain that, if he had been a 
Gentile, the fact would have been explicitly stated. 
Jesus, who is the soul of the Bible, was a Jew. 
Salvation is of the Jews, but it is for the world. 
The Messiah of the Jews is the Saviour of the 
world. 

But the Jews as a separate people did not 
come into existence for more than two thou- 
sand years after the fall of man ; and we cannot 
suppose that the world during all that period 
was without a knowledge of its Saviour. On 



144 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

the contrary, we are informed that the Saviour 
was revealed and promised to fallen man at the 
very gate of Eden. It was said to Adam and 
Eve, '' The seed of the woman shall bruise the 
head of the serpent." They were not driven out 
from Eden without hope. Christ, as sinful man's 
Saviour from the death of his sin, was revealed 
to them. That revelation was not gradual and 
progressive, but was full and all-sufficient at the 
beginning. God revealed the object of faith and 
the way of salvation and the mode of worship to 
the fallen race when yet it was an unmultiplied 
family. It was when families were multiplied 
and scattered that the knowledge of a Redeemer 
became darkened in the minds of men. When 
the race was reduced by the Flood to one fam- 
ily, the knowledge of Christ as the Redeemer of 
men was again universal. But again, as families 
multiplied and spread, the knowledge of the di- 
vine revelation became darkened and perverted 
in the minds of men. All this happened cen- 
turies before the first line of the Bible was writ- 
ten. In the midst of this widespread darkness, 
and all but universal forgetfulness of the prom- 
ised Redeemer, God called Abraham and entered 



IS CHRIST A LIVING SAVIOUR} 1 45 

into a peculiar covenant with him, separating him 
and his descendants from the rest of the world, and 
promising that of them should be born the promised 
Seed in whom all the families of earth should be 
blessed. This was the beginning of the peculiar 
people which developed into che Jewish nation. 

From Abraham to Moses, the writer of the 
first and oldest books of the Bible, was a period 
of nearly five hundred years. There may have 
been, as some critics contend, some short records 
before the days of Moses, which he used, under 
divine direction, in composing the Pentateuch; 
but be that as it may, we are safe in saying that 
the Bible begins with the writings of Moses, at 
least twenty- five hundred years after the fall of 
man. We cannot believe that man was left 
without a knowledge of the way of life for so 
many centuries after the great event in which is 
grounded his need of the revelation of a Saviour 
to redeem him from the death of sin ; and hence, 
we must conclude that the revelation of Christ, 
and of the way of salvation through him, did not 
originally spring from the Bible, but that it was 
made known in the world thousands of years be- 
fore the first word of the Bible was written. 



146 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

The Word of God in the words of men was 
handed down in oral traditions from fathers to 
their sons through all the generations from Adam 
to Moses. Evident traces of these traditions are 
found in all the ancient religions of the Oriental 
non-Bible lands. Our rehgion is not the out- 
come of the Bible, but the Bible is the outcome 
of our religion. Religion came first, and the Bible 
came afterward. In the Bible we have the in- 
spired record of the divine revelation of the true 
religion, but the revelation itself was in the world 
and was known among men long centuries before 
the first syllable of it was recorded in writing. 

I know that this view militates against a favor- 
ite theory held by certain critics, that the divine 
revelation of Christ Jesus, as the Messiah of the 
Jews and as the Saviour of the world, was pro- 
gressively and gradually imparted to the race. 
This theory is a gratuitous assumption which is 
not supported by Scripture nor founded on reason. 
It is not reasonable to suppose that the God of 
absolute justice, to say nothing of his mercy, 
would leave the human race for thousands of 
years to perish in total ignorance of the divine 
way of salvation. The Scriptures inform us tha,t. 



IS CHRIST A LIVING SAVIOUR? 147 

in fact he did not, for before driving the guilty- 
pair from Paradise he revealed unto them the di- 
vine plan of redemption through the Seed of the 
woman, who should bruise the head of the ser- 
pent, and thereby redeem the race from eternal 
death. There is no reason to believe that this 
revelation was not full and complete at the begin- 
ning, and from the beginning down through all 
the ages. On the contrary, from the necessity of 
the case, there is every reason to believe that the 
divine plan of man's salvation, in all its essential 
details, was made known at the gate of Eden, and 
that it was clearly understood by the antedilu- 
vians, and by Noah, by Abraham, by Isaac and 
Jacob, and by all the Israelites before the days of 
Moses; and perhaps it was also more or less 
clearly understood by many other tribes. Balaam 
was not an Israelite, and yet the God of Israel 
spake to him. He may have spoken to other 
non- Israelite teachers. 

It was not necessary for Moses, whose writings 
date at least twenty- five hundred years after the 
Fall, to have done more than to make bare men- 
tion of the fact that those who lived prior to his 
day were not left in ignorance as to the way of 



148 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

life. He wrote for his contemporaries and for 
future generations, and recorded the facts pertain- 
ing to man's sah-ation which are to be conserved 
in Holy Writ to the end of time for all men's in- 
struction. 

The Bible was not given to prove that there 
is a God, or that man is an immortal person. 
These are the two fundamental facts that are as- 
sumed in it as the basis on which religion becomes 
possible and a revelation needful. They are taken 
for granted as known and admitted by all ; and, 
as the underlying doctrines, they run through the 
Bible from beginning to end, permeating and 
vivifying ever}' part and particle. When Moses 
wrote there was no need of even so much as stat- 
ing these doctrines, because everybody believed 
them. The immortality of the soul was the uni- 
versal doctrine of the Oriental religions at the 
time of the Exodus, and for long generations 
afterward. Not atheism, but polytheism, was the 
great error that Rloses and the other writers of 
the first books of the Bible had to confront. The 
great questions which they had to answer were, 
not, An sit Dens? but, Qitid sit Dens? and, 
Qualis sit Dens ? The keynote in the early his- 



IS CHRIST A LIVING SAVIOUR? 1 49 

tory of Israel was, " Thy God is one, the eternal 
Person who alone is the Creator and moral Sover- 
eign of the universe/' It was only in the later 
ages, when fools began to say in their hearts, 
''There is no God," that men began to have 
doubts about the immortality of their souls. Be- 
fore Jesus came the darkness of Jewish Sadducee- 
ism and of Pagan atheism had come down upon 
the world ; and he came when this darkness had 
reached its midnight blackness; and then he 
brought life and immortality to light, saying, as 
he stood at the mouth of the opened tomb from 
which the dead, in response to his almighty word, 
was rising to life again, '' I am the resurrection 
and the life ; he that believeth in me, though he 
were dead, yet shall he live again ; and whoso- 
ever liveth and believeth in me shall never die." 
Thus he brought life and immortality to light, 
declaring that immortal life is more than immortal 
existence. It is spiritual life arising out of spirit- 
ual death through faith in him, in whom there is 
the life that is the light of men. The Bible, from 
beginning to end, is the revelation of the Lord 
Jesus Christ as the living Saviour of the dead 
world; and Christ, when thus revealed, brings 



I50 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS, 

life and immortality/immortal life, to light. This 
is the gospel of our salvation. It does not begin 
with Matthew, but with Genesis, and it runs 
through the whole Bible to the last word. Its 
first word is, '' In the beginning God created the 
heaven and the earth;" and its last word is, 
'' The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you 
all." At the beginning God is on the throne of 
his power as Creator, and at the end he is on the 
throne of his grace as Redeemer. This shows 
that some tremendous change has taken place in 
the relations between God and man. The Bible 
alone explains what this change is, and when and 
how it took place. We find that man, created in 
the image of his God in knowledge and holiness, 
was placed in Eden on probation with the alter- 
natives before him, of life on the condition of his 
perfect obedience, and of death as the penalty of 
disobedience. We find that man in this proba- 
tion stood, not for himself only, but for the whole 
race that should descend from him in the line of 
natural generation. But man, in the hour of 
temptation, failed and fell, involving himself and 
his entire race in the penalty of death. Our 
world, then, is a fallen world. It is a world of 



IS CHRIST A LIVING SAVIOUR} 151 

sin ; and in sin it is a world of dead souls. All 
men are dead in sin. But man does not cease to 
be, nor can he ever cease to be, for he is a created 
and immortal person. We must now seek for an 
explanation of this death which leaves man alive 
in his physical and intellectual Hfe while dead in 
sin. It is the death, not of the body nor of the 
intellect, but of the spirit of man. 

We have already found that there are two 
kinds of life on earth, the physical and the psy- 
chical — life in matter and life in mind. Of the first 
there are two forms, the vegetable and the animal. 
Now it seems that there are also two forms of 
psychical life, the intellectual and the spiritual. 
In physical Hfe the two forms, the vegetable and 
animal, are analogous in many points, but are so 
dissimilar in others that it is impossible to regard 
animal Hfe as only a higher degree of vegetable 
life. In psychical life both forms, the intellectual 
and the spiritual, inhere in the same substance — 
the immortal mind ; and yet spiritual death does 
not carry with it intellectual death. A man may 
be spiritually dead, and at the same time intel- 
lectually aHve. Man's mind in its creation is 
naturally immortal, and neither physical death 



152 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

on one side, nor spiritual death on the other, can 
destroy its natural and constitutional immortality, 
nor the consciousness of its own existence and 
activities. The physical death of man is not the 
end of his life, but only an event in his life. 

In the divine Word we are taught that all men 
since Adam's fall are, in their fallen condition, 
spiritually dead. The penalty for eating the for- 
bidden fruit, as preannounced to man, was, ''/n 
the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely 
die.*' Man did eat, and in eating he died, not 
physically nor intellectually, but spiritually. In 
Adam's transgression the race sinned and the race 
died. Accordingly we read, '' By one man sin 
entered into the world, and death by sin ; and so 
death passed upon all men, for that all have 
sinned." This is a dead world — a world of dead 
souls. This is spiritual death, and it does not 
involve physical or intellectual death. Physical 
death was in the world before man sinned, and, 
so far as the mere animal world is concerned, it 
is not a part of the penalty of man's sin. If man 
had not sinned, he might have been exempted 
from physical death. Who knows? We know, 
on the testimony of Scripture, that man is spiritu- 



IS CHRIST A LIVING SAVIOUR? 1 53 

ally dead in the midst of his physical and intel- 
lectual life — spiritually dead while in the full and 
conscious exercise of the functions of his body 
and the faculties of his mind. 

What, then, is spiritual life ? It must be a 
form of life higher than the intellectual, and yet, 
a form of life that inheres in the mind along 
with the intellectual. It must be a condition of 
mental hfe higher than mere intellectuality. It 
is that condition of mental life which the Script- 
ures call spiritual-mindedness. That condition 
consists in the free and harmonious fellowship of 
the created mind with the eternal Mind. What- 
ever breaks up the harmonious communion and 
intercourse between the soul of man and his 
Creator is the cause of man's spiritual death. 
Sin does this ; and hence sin is the cause of man's 
spiritual death. Therefore, the removal of man's 
sin will restore him to spiritual life, that is, to 
conscious and joyous communion with his God, 
in whom he lives and moves and has his being. 

Can sin be removed from the life of man ? It 
can be removed only in one way — through the 
redemption of Jesus Christ. The declaration of 
the fact that Jesus Christ came as the Lamb of 



154 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

God to take away the sin of the world is the 
gospel — the good news from heaven to earth — 
proclaimed in the Bible as its divine revelation. 
Man's spiritual life is, then, the redemption of his 
soul from the death of sin, and the bringing of it 
back into the life of holiness through the atone- 
ment of Jesus Christ, the living Saviour of the 
dead world. This divine plan of man's salvation 
is unfolded in the Bible, and nowhere else. It is 
a divine revelation, and not a human philosophy. 
Our Christianity is not an explanation of the phe- 
nomena of nature, but the introduction into our 
fallen world of a divine Person as the living Sav- 
iour of the dead race of men. It is not a system 
of morals, but the divine provision for the res- 
toration of spiritual Hfe to the dead soul. Faith 
in Jesus Christ is the condition of attainment 
unto this life. This faith is the hand of the soul 
accepting this life as a divine gift. '' The gift of 
God is eternal Hfe through Jesus Christ our Lord. 
He that believeth on the Son kat/i everlasting 
life ; and he that believeth not shall not see life ; 
but the wrath of God abideth upon him." 

As man is dead in sin, he can find his spiritual 
life only in the way of redemption from sin. 



IS CHRIST A LIVING SAVIOUR? 1 55 

Redemption means that the price must be paid. 
''The wages of sin is death." This is the price 
that must be paid for man's redemption. This 
price must be paid in man's nature, and on this 
earth, where man has sinned. If not paid in this 
life it must be paid in the next life, and there the 
penalty becomes eternal death. In order to re- 
deem a lost possession the price must be paid 
within the limits of the time and of the condi- 
tions of redemption. It was therefore necessary 
that man's Redeemer should come to the earth 
and make the atonement in the domain where 
man had sinned, and where he is yet in a re- 
deemable condition. We cannot conceive of 
Christ's making the atonement in heaven, be- 
cause death cannot exist where sin has never 
entered. Jesus Christ could not have died in 
heaven. There is no death there. We cannot 
conceive of Christ's making the atonement in hell 
for man's sin committed on earth. Hell is the 
domain of death. In hell all are spiritually dead, 
and the death is eternal. There can be no life 
nor resurrection there. If Jesus had died for 
man in hell, his death would have been eternal. 
It is the risen Lord, he that was dead but is 



156 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS, 

alive again forevermore, that redeems. This is the 
world of probation, where life and death meet in 
conflict and contend for the victory one over the 
other. The redeemed are prepared on earth and 
then translated to heaven, where death can never 
enter. The unredeemed, when removed from 
earth, are transported to hell, where life has no 
admission. Hell is beyond the reach of life. It 
is the dominion of unredeemable death. Then 
Christ must come to earth and die for man, 
where death can be overcome by a resurrection 
from the dead. But man's Saviour must be born 
into his life in order to die his death. Hence, 
the Voice of Mercy that spake to fallen man at 
the gate of Eden — the eternal Word that was 
with God in the beginning — the Hving Logos 
that is God — became incarnate in the soul and 
body of man. Thus the Word was made flesh 
and dwelt among men, the eternal Son of God 
became the Son of Man on earth, the Lord of 
heaven became man's brother in human Hfe, in 
order that he might die man's death, and, rising 
from the dead, redeem man and restore him to 
spiritual life. Thus eternal life, the life of re- 
deemed man, is the gift of God through Jesus 



IS CHRIST A LIVING SAVIOUR? 157 

Christ our Lord. It is the unmerited gift of in- 
finite love. This gospel is condensed and focal- 
ized in the one glorious declaration that shines 
brighter than the sun, and floods the earth with 
Hght and fills it with hope : '' For God so loved 
the world that he gave his only begotten Son, 
that whosoever believeth in him should not per- 
ish, but have everlasting life." 

By his death, making atonement for man's sin, 
Jesus brings life into the dead world. But what 
was the death of Jesus Christ? Was it physical 
death or spiritual death ? Most surely it was phys- 
ical death. Men saw him die upon the cross. Men 
saw his dead body buried in the tomb. But was 
physical death all of the death he died ? He died 
in his physical death under the sentence of man's 
law. That was the great crime of the world. 
Men crucified the Redeemer of men. But the 
wages of sin is spiritual death. ' Did Jesus Christ 
pay for man the wages of sin? That was the 
price of man's redemption. Spiritual death con- 
sists, as we have seen, in being dissevered from 
and forsaken of God. This death, in the midst 
of his physical agonies, Christ died for man. In 
Gethsemane he said, '' My soul is exceeding sor- 



158 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

rowful, even unto death." On the cross he cried 
out, '' My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken 
me?" This is the death which Christ died as 
man's substitute under the sentence of God's law. 
As man's Redeemer Jesus Christ took upon him- 
self and endured for man all the agony and igno- 
miny of spiritual death. This is what the Creed 
means in the mysterious clause '' he descended 
into hell." 

Jesus Christ in dying paid, in all respects, the 
'' wages of sin " ; and consequently his death has 
made full atonement for man's sin; and so it 
brings spiritual life within the reach of every 
man who will accept it by faith, the condition on 
which it is offered to the race. 

This brings us to the consideration of a most 
significant point, in which the death of Jesus is 
differentiated from the death of any other person 
that ever died; it was the death of the sinless 
and the innocent, and consequently must have 
been a vicarious death, the sinless dying for the 
sinful. The same justice that demands death as 
the penalty of sin prohibits the death of the sin- 
less. If the death of Jesus Christ was not the 
vicarious atonement for man's sin, then it was an 



IS CHRIST A LIVING SAVIOUR? 1 59 

unutterable and inconceivable outrage to justice. 
It is impossible to justify the death of Jesus on 
any other hypothesis than that it was, as the 
Scriptures teach, the sinless giving himself unto 
death for the redemption of the sinful. It was 
the self-sacrifice of infinite mercy to infinite jus- 
tice, paying the price of man's redemption from 
the righteous penalty of justice. Then the death 
of the Man Christ Jesus was both self-sacrificial 
and self- worshipful. His death was self-sacrifi- 
cial. This means immeasurably more than that 
it was a self-sacrifice in the ordinary sense of the 
word. It was all this, and immensely more. 
Men have lived and died in self-sacrifice for a 
good cause. Patriots have died in self-sacrifice 
for their country. Martyrs have died in self-sac- 
rifice for their religion. The death of Christ was 
more than martyrdom. It was a worshipful sac- 
rifice — the only real sacrifice that ever was, or 
ever can be, in this world. All other sacrifices, 
Jewish or pagan, were, consciously or uncon- 
sciously, typical and prophetical of this, the great 
sacrifice of the sinless for the sinful. 

The sacrifice of the sinless Christ has power to 
redeem sinful men from the death of sin. It is the 



l6o UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

power of God unto salvation to the believer. But 
in every sacrifice there must be a priest worshiping, 
a victim which is offered in worship, and God who 
is worshiped. All these we find in the crucifixion 
of Jesus Christ on the Roman cross. The Man 
Christ Jesus, the God-man, is the High-priest of 
our redemption; the real man in Jesus Christ was 
the victim that was offered — the Lamb slain from 
the foundation of the world ; the true God in the 
Man Christ Jesus is the Divinity to whom the 
sacrifice was offered in worship. Thus the death 
of the sinless Christ making atonement for sinful 
men was the most real and the most sublime act 
of worship possible or conceivable. It was God 
worshiping himself in the sacrificial offering of his 
assumed humanity to his eternal divinity. This 
was the price of man's redemption, and this price 
Jesus Christ has paid in his death on the cross. 
That death was both self-sacrificial and self-wor- 
shipful. The cross, then, on which Christ died 
was an altar of worship. From the human point 
of view it was the contrivance of execution, an 
object of torture and shame; but from the divine 
point of view it was an altar of worship, the ob- 
ject of transcendent glory. 



IS CHRIST A LIVING SAVIOUR? l6l 

It was necessary that Christ should thus die, 
in order that his death might make the atonement 
for the sin of the world. But it was not possible 
that he should be holden of death. When he 
died without sin, he paid the penalty of man's sin. 
By death he conquered death. Death being con- 
quered, he rose to life again. It was not possible 
that the vanquished enemy should hold him. He 
paid the wages of sin. Thus he redeemed Hfe 
from death. His redemption was perfect and 
complete. He redeemed both soul and body. 

He lived while his body was in the grave. He 
met the pardoned thief in Paradise. He lived 
in life apart from his body, that men might know 
that their souls, redeemed, shall live in Paradise 
while their bodies sleep in their graves. The in- 
termediate life is a conscious Hfe — a life of mem- 
ory and of knowledge. How could there be a 
meeting between Jesus and the saved thief with- 
out self-conscious life, without the memory of the 
earth-life, without the knowledge of one another, 
and without the power of thought and of dis- 
course with one another? His atonement was 
also redemption from physical death. That man 
might know this, he rose in physical life out of 



1 62 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

the grave on the third day. Man shall rise in 
physical life, and know this world again. 

'' He that beHeveth on him shall not perish, 
but have everlasting hfe." The risen Christ is 
the living Saviour of this dead world ; but faith 
in him is the condition on which this salvation, 
spiritual Hfe, is offered to all men. '' Whosoever 
beHeveth shall be saved." Man is again put on 
probation, not this time as a race, but each man 
for himself. The future and eternal destiny of 
each is suspended upon the free vohtion of his 
own will, receiving or rejecting the salvation now 
and here offered to him. '' Whosoever will may 
take of the water of Hfe freely." AH are invited, 
and aH may come if they wHl ; and no one that 
comes is ever rejected. 

But this offer, as the whole trend of the Script- 
ures teaches, is limited to this Hfe. What man 
does here determines what he shall be hereafter 
forever. '' He that beHeveth shaH be saved. He 
that beHeveth not shall be damned." This is the 
short and terrible alternative which the Bible sets 
before every man of the race to whom its gospel 
is preached. Between the beHevers and the un- 
beHeving in the future Hfe there is fixed an im- 



IS CHRIST \4 HIDING SAVIOUR? 1 63 

passable gulf. The soul goes out from this mortal 
life to meet its endless and changeless destiny. 
It is just as reasonable to expect physical life on 
a post-mortem medication as to hope for spiritual 
life on a post-mortem probation. The future 
destiny depends upon the faith that forms the 
character in this present life. 

But in order to avoid a possible misinterpreta- 
tion, we add that, in the light of reason as illumi- 
nated by Scripture, we believe that all dying in a 
state of infancy are saved in immortal life through 
the atonement of Jesus Christ our Lord ; and by 
a state of infancy we mean that condition which 
incapacitates the mind for the conscious and free 
exercise of the volition of a free and responsible 
will. This incapacity may arise from the want or 
defect of mental development, or from the invinci- 
ble darkness of an external environment. Eter- 
nal justice demands that this exception should be 
imbedded in the provision of infinite mercy that 
offers immortal life to our race, now spiritually 
dead, on the condition and with the proviso of 
faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, who is the living 
Saviour of our dead world. 

Life can only originate from life; therefore, 



1 64 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

the Saviour of the dead world must be a living 
Saviour. '^ He ever liveth ; though he was dead 
he is alive again, and Hveth forever and ever/' 
Nothing less than a new life in the soul, produced 
by the touch of God's Hving Spirit, is salvation. 
Therefore, Jesus saith to every man of the race, 
as he did to Nicodemus, '' Verily, verily, I say 
unto thee, except a man be born again, he cannot 
see the kingdom of God." This new birth is the 
change from spiritual death into spiritual life. It 
is an effect, and must have an adequate cause ; 
and as the effect is life, the cause must be a living 
power. Death cannot produce life. The living 
must spring from the Hving. All science has now 
settled down in the conviction that life cannot be 
a spontaneous generation from the dead. There- 
fore, spiritual life must spring from an ever living 
Spirit. Hence, Jesus saith, '' Except a man be 
born of the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom 
of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, 
and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit." 
This is true science. The law of cause and ef- 
fect requires the nature of the effect to be con- 
tained in the nature of the cause. Figs cannot 
grow on thistles, nor grapes on thorns. Life 



IS CHRIST A LIVING SAVIOUR? 1 65 

produces life, and like produces like. Spiritual 
life for dead souls must spring from the Spirit of 
the living Saviour. 

There are three realms of life and experience 
possible and accessible to man: the animal life, 
in which he Hves and dies in common with the 
beasts that perish ; the intellectual life, in which 
man is elevated into a whole realm of experiences 
in which the beasts can have no share with him ; 
and still above this is the realm of spiritual life, 
with its new experiences, of which unregenerate 
man can form no proper and adequate compre- 
hension. Discourses concerning Christian expe- 
rience in the realm of spiritual life must be as un- 
intelligible to the unconverted and unspiritual of 
earth as discourses concerning colors and shades 
would be to those who have been blind from 
birth. ''The natural man," saith St. Paul, '' re- 
ceiveth not the things of the Spirit of God ; for 
they are foolishness unto him; neither can he 
know them, because they are spiritually dis- 
cerned." A man may be learned in the lore of 
men, he may have made deep researches in phi- 
losophy and science, he may have traveled far 
and wide and seen many countries and learned 



1 66 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

many languages, he may have extorted by his 
experimental methods many secrets from nature, 
he may know of this world and its wisdom a 
thousand times more than the humble disciple of 
Jesus who has been born of the Spirit and by 
spiritual regeneration has entered into the realm 
of spiritual experience and discernment; but if 
that humble disciple of Jesus, whether educated 
or illiterate, be indeed a spiritually-minded man, 
he has entered into a realm of life as much 
higher than the highest attainments of the car- 
nally-minded man as vision is above touch, as 
rational thought is above animal instinct, as spirit 
is above matter, and as heaven is above earth. 
He has begun to live the immortal life. This life 
begins on earth, and never ends ; it goes on ex- 
panding forever into new and higher develop- 
ments of spiritual discernment and felicity. This 
is no flourish of rhetoric, nor dream of the mystic. 
It is a grand and glorious reality, of which mill- 
ions to-day have precious and priceless experi- 
ence. It is the life of the soul which Christ, the 
living Saviour of the dead world, imparts to all 
who believe in his name. At times, in the ex- 
perience of every Christian, the consciousness of 



IS CHRIST A LIVING SAVIOUR? 1 67 

this spiritual life is more vivid than at others; 
and some Christians attain unto loftier heights in 
their experiences than others because they have 
a stronger faith and a deeper spirituality. 

More than fourteen centuries ago, on the 
shores of the Italian sea, the blessedness of this 
spiritual life and its assurance of immortal bliss 
were the subject of discourse between a saintly 
woman who was drawing near the close of her 
mortal life and a young man who, having passed 
from spiritual death into spiritual life, had just 
consecrated himself unreservedly to the ministry 
of the gospel of him who had just rescued his 
soul from the death of sin. That young man 
was the highly gifted and learned St. Augustine, 
and the woman who conversed with him was his 
pure-minded and devout-hearted mother, whose 
prayers for her son were not forgotten in heaven 
and can never be forgotten on earth. The scene 
of the memorable conversation has been painted 
by Ary Scheffer, over the title '' St. Augustine 
and His Mother Monica." This is the passage 
that inspired the painter: ''When," says St. 
Augustine, '' the day drew near on which my 
mother was to leave this life, it chanced that we 



1 68 UNSETTLED QUESTIONS. 

found ourselves alone, she and I, leaning upon 
the sill of a window which looked upon the gar- 
den of the house where we had stopped at the 
port of Ostia. There, far from the crowd, after 
the fatigue of a long journey, we were waiting 
for the moment when we were to set sail. We 
were alone, conversing with indescribable sweet- 
ness concerning Christ and the sweet fellowship 
of his Spirit with our spirits. Forgetting the 
past and stretching forward toward the future we 
asked ourselves, What shall be for the saints in 
heaven that immortal life ' which eye hath not 
seen, nor ear heard, and which hath not entered 
into the heart of man ' ? And then, borne aloft 
on wings of love toward Him who is, we climbed, 
as it were, up through the celestial regions 
whence the stars, the moon, and the sun send us 
their light ; and while speaking of our aspirations 
toward that life that is to come^ we touched it 
for a moment with a bound of the heart, and 
sighed as we left there captive the first-fruits of 
the Spirit, and came back again to the sound of 
the voice, and to the world which begins and 
ends. Then my mother said to me, ' My son, so 
far as I am concerned, there is nothing more to 



IS CHRIST A LIVING SAVIOUR} 1 69 

bind me to this life. What shall I do in it? 
There was one thing for which I desired to live, 
and that was to see you a Christian before I left 
this world. My God has granted me that, and 
more than that. Why should I tarry here any 
longer?"' 

Such is the foundation of the Christian's hope, 
such is the feHcity of his experience, and such is 
his triumph in the face of death. With Christ 
Jesus as our Hving Saviour to save our souls 
from eternal death, why should we fear to die 
this mortal death? Millions have seen his light, 
in which the assurance of immortal life shines, 
and have passed, without fear or faltering, 
through the dark gateway of mortal death into 
the shining realm of immortal Hfe, where sin is 
unknown and sorrow can never cast a shadow. 
Christians depart this life to be with the Lord 
forevermore. 

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control, and manly Christianity. We can certify that no one 
will find it stupid." — Si. A?idrew's Cross. 

First Battles and How to Fight Them, by F. A. 

Atkins. Friendly Chats with Young Men. ..|,5o 
"It is true in its substance, attractive in its stj^le, and ad- 
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Rev.JoJui Hall, D.D. 

The Spiritual Athlete and How He Trains, by W. 

A. Bodell. Introduction by Rev.B, Fay Mills.. | .50 
A work for young men, pithj*, pointed and practical. 
"Its power and value lie in the consistent carrying out of 

the comparison between phj^sical and spiritual training." — The 

Independent. 

Brave and True, by J. Thain Davidson. Talks 
to Young Men $ -So 

"This is one of the books the wide distribution of which 
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Thoroughness, by Dr. J. Thain Davidson. Talks 
to Young Men. i2mo., cloth $ .50 

"Dr. Davidson knows 3-oung men and how to talk to them. 
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The Secret of Success; or Finger Posts on the 
Highway of Life, by John T. Dale. Introduction 
by Hon. John V. Farwell. 8vo., cloth |!i-50 

"This volume is a jDerfect thesaurus of maxims and of 
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Turn Over a New Leaf, and Other Words to Young 
People at School, by B. B. Comegys J .50 

' •'These talks are on a great many every-day topics of great 
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The Fall of the Staincliffes. Prize Story on the 
Evils of Gambling, by A. Colbeck. Paper, 
25 cents; cloth 75 

"It depicts in a clear, forcible way the terrible evils of intem- 
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CHICAGO. Fleming H. Revell Company, kew tork. 



CHOICE GIFT BOOKS 



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Poems by Frances Ridley Havergal. Author's 
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**The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life*' may be had 
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CHICAGO Fleming H. Revell Company, kewtork. 




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